


Blood Crest

by Cauchy



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blood Drinking, Deathly Hallows, Dementors, Divination, Gen, Goblins, Hags, Horcruxes, Inferi, Magic Theory, Master of Death, Mind Control, Morally Grey Harry Potter, Necromancer Harry Potter, Necromancy, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Prophecy, Racism, Suicide, Torture, Vampires, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-30
Updated: 2021-02-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:07:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 58
Words: 472,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22022296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cauchy/pseuds/Cauchy
Summary: Nine-year-old Harry accidentally apprentices himself to a necromancer. Things go downhill from there.
Relationships: Harry Potter & Tom Riddle | Voldemort
Comments: 615
Kudos: 564





	1. Mudblood

Harry skulked about in a murky corner of the park, where a large oak tree with enormous, drooping limbs formed a makeshift tunnel. It was his secret base, safe from his corpulent cousin Dudley, who couldn't even fit halfway inside. Not that there was any threat of pursuit this evening; Dudley was probably sunk into a couch in front of the telly right now, buried in greasy crisp packets and whinging for Aunt Petunia to go away as she fussed over him and tried in vain to interest him in fruitcake.

Harry, nursing a shallow cut on his cheek and shivering in the crisp autumn air, reminded himself that the fruitcake was always too dry and packed full of hard raisins, and he had no desire to sneak inside and slip it into his pocket after Dudley inevitably knocked it to the floor. No desire at all. His stomach grumbled.

It had been a few hours since Aunt Petunia had thrown him out of the house for 'ruining her precious Diddlydum's day', and the sun was creeping ever lower on the horizon. The embrace of the oak tree grew less comforting and more depressing as the surrounding illumination receded. Harry, seeing that the park was now deserted, cautiously ventured out of his secret base and stepped toward the swings. One of them was vandalised and completely unusable, the seat hanging at an awkward angle inches under the top bar, but the others were reasonably functional.

Harry winced as his too-large trainers crunched loudly on the wood chips. The sound shattered the evening silence and seemed so much bigger than it actually was. He took another step, and there was a sharp crack, like breaking glass. He looked down wildly to see what he had stepped on, except he could not find anything different. When he looked up again, he gave a yell and scrambled back quickly as he was met with the sight of the Grim Reaper.

Breathing in and out harshly, Harry regained his wits and noticed that the Grim Reaper was actually a man in a thick black cloak, and the hand that was poking out from under the rim was thin and pale but not exactly skeletal. He concluded, a little ashamed of his earlier reaction, that this was not the Grim Reaper, but just one of those ‘strange freaks’ who sometimes bowed to him on the street and whom Uncle Vernon loudly disapproved of.

Then the Not Grim Reaper reached out and grabbed his arm. Harry was so surprised that he just stood there and let it happen, except his arm apparently did not agree with that, because there was a flash of golden light and the cloaked man recoiled sharply like he had been burned, his hand disappearing into the folds of his cloak

"Excuse me," Harry tried saying, but his throat had clenched up some from the excitement and it came out a little more high-pitched than he would have preferred.

"Schlammblut!" the cloaked man hissed out in a surprisingly normal voice, except that the word he had said was complete nonsense. Harry got the idea that it was unflattering, however, just from the tone of voice.

“Excuse me?” Harry said again, this time managing to keep his voice steady. He felt his courage coming back to him every second that the man just stood there, though he wished that he could see the face under the hood. It was silly, because he doubted he would recognise the person anyway. The adult men Harry knew consisted of Uncle Vernon and the school headmaster. Obviously, this person could not possibly be Uncle Vernon, and the thought of the uptight, moustached headmaster wearing such a freaky cloak was just too laughable.

“Are you a mudblood?” the man asked, thankfully in comprehensible English this time, except Harry still had no idea what a ‘mudblood’ was other than that it was clearly not a good thing.

“No?” Harry tried, because agreeing that he was some kind of bad thing was just dumb.

The man seemed surprised, though, and said, "Oh, my apologies. Why are you in this type of place, then? Where are your parents?"

Now that he spoke a longer sentence, Harry could hear a strange accent to the slow words. For one, the man seemed to have trouble pronouncing the letter ‘w,’ which was odd, because it was a very essential sort of letter. Harry supposed that this was the type of ‘no-good foreigner’ Uncle Vernon was always complaining about. And of course the man was also wearing a freaky cloak, which made it even worse. Harry decided that anyone Uncle Vernon would definitely hate couldn't be that bad, and so figured he could answer his questions.

"They're dead. I live here, with my aunt and uncle," he explained.

"They are our kind, and they live here?" the man demanded, sounding very incredulous. Harry looked the man up and down again, and wondered what he meant by ‘our kind.’ Finally he concluded that since both the man and himself were favourite sorts of things for Uncle Vernon to complain about, it must be that there was a fundamental difference involved.

So he shook his head and said, "Well no, they're not like us, they're—" he stopped, searching for a word, and could think of only one, "—normal."

"Muggles," the man repeated, as if for clarification, except he said it with such revulsion that again, Harry could tell that this new word was some kind of swear word, an adult one that he probably didn't know because he was too young. He shrugged, not going to disagree that the Dursleys deserved to be called by a swear word or two.

"And you can stand it, to live with them?" the man asked him. Harry was beginning to get a little concerned, because no one had ever been that interested in his life with Dursleys before. But the lack of attention he always got only meant that his relatives could do whatever they wanted. Wasn't it good that someone seemed to care, for once?

"Well, they don't like me much," Harry answered cautiously, but truthfully. The cloaked man snorted.

"It's horrible, a joke, that our kind could be raised by muggles," he said. "Why don't you come with me? We must take you from that rubbish at once. How old are you, seven?"

"Nine," Harry corrected, a little annoyed at the man's low estimate. The man seemed unruffled by his mistake.

"Nine. You can become my apprentice. I have just lost the last," he offered. Harry blinked.

"Apprentice?" he asked, finding the word unfamiliar.

The man seemed to misinterpret his question, however, because he answered, "I am an enchanter. A good profession. And there's the other thing too, but we can discuss that later." The last bit was almost muttered, as if the man were talking to himself.

Harry stared at him, more confused than before. What other thing? What was an enchanter? But he did not voice any of his questions, because there was one thing that stood out, and it was that this man, who had been nicer to him than he ever remembered any adult being, had just offered to take him away from the Dursleys. Forever, by the sound of it.

"Okay," Harry said, mind racing with wonderful thoughts of leaving Privet Drive. No more Dudley or Dudley's friends, no more cooking delicious-smelling food that he wasn't even allowed to eat, no more living inside a cupboard. Because Harry wasn't dumb; he knew that other kids did not live in cupboards. Dudley was a prime example of that.

"Very good. May I hold your hand? We need it to apparate," the man said. Just like that, he extended his hand, and Harry grasped it happily. This time, there was no weird flash of light or anything. "Yes, very good," the man repeated.

They disappeared.


	2. Fool

Harry felt the world constrict around him, like he was being shoved with great force up a very narrow tube, before the sensation ended abruptly as everything exploded into bright orange light. He barely had the chance to realise that he was staring straight into a street lamp when the feeling came right back, and he had to fight not to choke.

They emerged in a starlit alleyway between two dusty brick buildings. The unpleasant reek of decaying rubbish wafted up Harry's nostrils as he inhaled deeply and rapidly. He wanted to hold his breath, but his body wouldn't allow it, deprived of air as it was, so he was forced to take in the nauseating smell. It made trying not to vomit twice as hard, but somehow, Harry managed, swallowing convulsively.

He turned to the cloaked man to ask what that had been and where they were now, because there was just no way that the horrible thing had been normal, but the man was not even looking at him. Harry tugged at the hand holding him, finding that the grip was vice-like and that the man's attention remained diverted as he muttered under his breath.

Something rough was pressed against his occupied hand, and Harry glanced down to see a length of rope brushing his thumb. That was all he could process before he felt himself launch into the air, doubling over as something dragged him along like there was a hook behind his navel. A myriad of dizzying colours swirled around him, and he had to shut his eyes to keep from projectile vomiting. Fortunately, the turbulence was not as bad with closed eyes. He only felt like he was bobbing gently in the wind.

Were they flying? What was this? It was a bit too much for Harry's mind to process, and he was so confused that the concept of mere confusion no longer covered the situation. He had about a minute of being pulled along by that funny hook-like feeling and keeping his eyes screwed shut before the almost pleasant journey ended and he was unceremoniously dumped onto the ground, face first.

Groaning and rubbing at his bruised jaw, Harry opened his eyes and pushed himself off the floor. The cloaked man was beside him, blocking most of the view, but Harry could see that they had landed inside a small room with stained wood floors and mottled white walls. There wasn't much furniture in the room, just an uncomfortable-looking wooden chair, a short filing cabinet, and several cushions littered about. The roof was heavily slanted, leading Harry to believe that they were in an attic of some sort. For some reason, there was a large, equally slanted fireplace against one wall that looked completely incongruous with the rest of the room.

But first things came first. "What _was_ that?" Harry demanded, once he felt less like throwing up. His stomach was still churning, but at least it did not seem as eager to leap out of his mouth as it did a moment ago.

"Two times apparition and then portkey. Safety precaution," the man said, as if something other than complete nonsense had just come out of his mouth. Harry wanted to ask what the heck a bloody portkey was, but obviously it was exactly the thing that had just happened, the minute-long adventure of being dragged along by his spine. Though it was an appropriate answer to his question, Harry also found it supremely unenlightening.

The cloaked man left Harry there on the ground, moving to the filing cabinet and pulling out the second drawer. He had to stoop down to reach it, shuffling around a bit before he resurfaced with a sheaf of papers. He motioned for Harry to get up, which he did. At this point, it occurred to him that he had no idea where he was, what was going on, or even what the man's name was.

A tinge of fear crept into Harry's heart. He kept it at bay, telling himself that nothing actually bad had happened yet. And there were things he could do, questions he could ask, to fix all that.

"What's your name?" he asked, deciding to start with the basics. The cloaked man made a little amused sound.

"Joachim Petri, but you will address me as Master, if you must," he said. "And what is your name, Apprentice?"

Harry was still not entirely sure what that word meant, but he replied dutifully, "Harry Potter, sir." In this room now instead of in the middle of the play park, Harry got the sense that this man was to be respected.

"Harry, then," said Petri, and Harry was not sure he was comfortable with the man using his first name, but he also was not comfortable bringing it up. "I have here the apprenticeship contract. Fortunately, I kept several copies, or I would have run out."

At the time, Harry did not fully grasp the ominousness of this casual admission.

He took the sheaf of unexpectedly thick and yellowy papers from Petri, and saw with consternation that even the writing was all nonsense. Harry was not very good at reading, but even he could tell that none of the words on the page were English.

"I can't read this, sir," he said, feeling a little stupid as he said it despite knowing that he wasn't _meant_ to be able to read something like that.

"Problematic. You must learn German as soon as possible," Petri said. Still, he flicked his hand and suddenly there was a stick in it, and with a flourish he tapped it against the paper.

To Harry's astonishment, the words wriggled slightly and then transformed before his eyes. He looked more closely and could see that he knew most of them now.

"What was that?" he asked.

"Translation charm, obviously," Petri replied, though Harry could not see what was obvious about it. He had more questions, but could sense that Petri was impatient, and he knew from experience that impatient adults were not nice adults, so he tried to read the text instead.

It was all very confusing, even if he knew the words, and before he had even made it through a third of the first page, a feather was forcefully shoved into his hands.

"Just sign it," Petri said, clearly even more impatient than he had been before. "It's a standard apprenticeship contract. No tricks." As he spoke, he pulled the papers from Harry, shuffled them so that the bottom page was on top, and handed it back.

Harry took them absently, staring in confusion at the feather in his hand, but he quickly realized that the bottom of it was thin and pointy, so it was probably a fancy pen.

"It's a blood quill," Petri said, gesturing at the feather pen. "You need no other ink."

Feeling trepidation but also pressure from Petri's clear irritation, Harry knelt down, set the papers on the ground, and pressed the nub of the "blood quill" to the line. As he drew the first vertical slash of his name, he gasped and discovered for himself just where the "blood" part of the name had come from.

The red line that sliced like fire into the back of his hand disappeared as quickly as it had come, and Harry would have thought that he had daydreamed it, except that the spot still ached with echoes of the earlier pain.

A vertical stroke glistened on the page in bright red beneath his quill.

The casual prompt of "Go on," from Petri told Harry that this was apparently supposed to happen. Even he knew that there was something wrong with a pen that cut into the back of his hand, but he supposed that since the marks had vanished, it was fine to use. Bracing himself, he quickly wrote down the rest of his name in a sloppy cursive, like he had seen Uncle Vernon do with signatures. A stinging trail carved itself into the back of his hand, but when he inspected it he could see that it had healed perfectly, without even a trace.

"Good," Petri said, finally sounding pleased.


	3. Apprentice

As it turned out, life as Master Petri's apprentice was only a slight upgrade from life at the Dursleys. If the Dursleys had treated Harry like a servant, then Master Petri treated him like a glorified servant. In particular, Harry still had to cook, and more often than not, he still did not get to eat what he made. Instead of sleeping in a cupboard under the stairs, he slept in Master Petri's closet, because the flat only had one bedroom, and the attic was for receiving "special" clients.

Right after he signed the contract, Master Petri had forced him to hold an orb that glowed a garish red if he lied and started interrogating him about his life. Most of it turned out to be about the Dursleys, and though Harry had found them uncomfortable to talk about, it wasn't as though he had had a choice. This topic had suitably distracted Master Petri from whatever else he had wanted to ask, as the man had worked himself into a rage, thoroughly denouncing the Dursleys as muggle scum. He had then proceeded to treat Harry in much the same way, though Harry still found Master Petri a sight more tolerable than his relatives. At least they weren't related.

Somehow, though Harry was not sure how, he had managed to completely gloss over the fact that he had had no idea that magic existed before his first meeting with Master Petri. The man was still under the impression that Harry's parents were a witch and wizard, and Master Petri was so adamant about how mudbloods were useless for everything except ingredients for 'special' spells that Harry would do anything to keep it that way.

Actually, for the first week, Harry had been worried that he would be the next to be chopped up in the attic for one of Master Petri's 'special' orders, because Harry clearly was as muggle as they came, but after an incident in which he lost his temper and set Master Petri's robes on fire, he had thankfully become convinced otherwise.

Instead of getting angry and cursing him, Master Petri had been delighted at this development and had declared that Harry was ready to start the 'other thing' the next day. Which was today.

Master Petri was usually pretty straightforward, but on this subject he would always say 'special' or 'other' and completely skirt around the topic. Still, Harry had enough of an idea of what the 'other thing' was to feel uncomfortable, namely that it involved the attic, mudbloods, and blood, the possible results of which did not take too much imagination to guess at.

"I am enchanter in the day, and in the evening I work on the other thing. You are too young for enchanting, so I will first teach you about the other," Master Petri said, ushering Harry up the trapdoor of the attic. The master then repeated the sentence in German, and Harry did his best to try to distinguish all the sounds.

He had two magical things to help him learn a completely new language: a special potion, and a glass ball filled with smoke called a remembrall. It was one of the many enchanted items produced by his teacher, and the smoke inside it turned different colours depending on his state of mind. It was also supposed to slowly improve his memory, though he was still not sure about that part actually being true.

Master Petri was merciless, and expected Harry to remember sentences after the first time he heard them. If Harry could not understand something that Master Petri thought he could, Harry would promptly be hit by the lashing curse, which was a horrible invention that burned like strong whip strokes but left no marks. It was Master Petri's favourite punishment for light infractions. Harry didn't want to know what the punishment for heavy infractions was.

Master Petri had said that, in this business, one needed to know English, German, Russian, and Norwegian at the minimum. Harry was not looking forward to learning even more languages, at least not using Master Petri's questionable methods.

The moment Harry pushed himself through the hole in the attic floor, he had to gape at the completely new look of the place.

For one, it was about four times as big as it had been before. The fireplace was no longer crooked, and there were actual chairs and tables around, including several long worktables. The walls were covered in cabinets of all shapes, colours, and sizes, and there was large, square patch of stone floor in the centre of the room.

Catching his amazed look, Master Petri explained, "I have let you through the protective enchantments." Then Harry had to scramble to pay attention to note the translation of the sentence.

Master Petri beckoned for him to follow, so Harry went with him to the far end of the room, where there was a row of cabinets in a light-coloured wood. The master opened up the biggest door and Harry was greeted with the sight of rows and rows of clear crystal phials, each filled up with a half-opaque red liquid. Harry had the horrible idea that he knew exactly what it was.

"Drachenblut, Tierblut, Muggelblut, Zaubererblut," Master Petri recited, as he pointed to each shelf, confirming Harry's suspicions. He looked up at the first row with the dragon blood, which was the smallest, with only five little phials. He was not surprised, honestly, that dragons existed, though he hoped they were what he thought they were (giant, fire-breathing, winged lizards). Then he glanced down to the biggest middle shelves of animal and muggle blood. The amount of muggle blood stored up in those large flasks made Harry feel a little sick. Down below, again in smaller quantities, was the wizard blood on a vial rack. Each had a handwritten label stuck to it, though the words were too small for him to read from that distance.

"What are these for, sir?" Harry asked, feeling that it was a safe question.

"For dynamic enchantments, one must use blood to preserve the enchantment but not lock it. The dragon blood is best for this purpose, but it is expensive." The face that Master Petri made at the word, 'expensive,' was a little funny and deepened all of his wrinkles, making him look ancient. Harry still had no idea how old the man was. Usually he looked approximately middle-aged. His dark brown hair was peppered with steel grey, and light lines formed around his mouth and on his forehead when he frowned, but it was impossible to make a confident guess.

"The rest?" Harry prompted. Master Petri's hand whipped out and decked him on the side of his head. Harry almost expected it and flinched back with the motion so that it didn't knock him silly.

"Don't interrupt." Master Petri repeated the explanation in German, slowly enough that Harry could pick out the main words, and then continued, "Animal and muggle blood are cheap to get, but make cheap quality. Wizard blood is better for special types of enchantment. We use it today."

Harry remembered that he was going to learn about the special, other thing today. He felt a little trepidation as he saw Master Petri reach out and select one of the vials in the middle of the rack. He handed it to Harry, who took it with a little surprise and turned it to read the label. It was someone's full name. Presumably the blood had belonged to that person.

"Why can I learn this, when I'm too young for normal enchantment?" Harry asked. He winced as the question came out, because it sounded impertinent, but fortunately, Master Petri did not seem to notice.

"Static enchantment is simple and requires much power, which you do not yet have. Special dynamic enchantment has more preparation, so you may assist," he explained. Harry nodded, satisfied, though not yet convinced that it would be a good experience.

A moment later, his fears were confirmed as Master Petri called out, "Rosenkol!"

A small, wrinkled monstrosity clad in a ragged white sheet like a toga appeared with a piercing crack.

Later, Harry would marvel at the fact that a house elf had been named a misspelled Brussels sprout. At the moment, though, he knew neither what a house elf nor Rosenkohl was, and so was simply shocked out of his mind.

With a yelp, he leaped backward, only keeping his hold on the vial in his hand by some miracle. Harry wanted to demand an explanation, but Master Petri was clearly unsurprised and Harry had retained enough wits to see that this was something he was supposed to know about. He hated the nervous feeling that came up whenever that happened. What if he had to say something about it before Master Petri had revealed enough information? Harry forced himself to take some slow breaths. He would worry about that when it came to it.

Master Petri barked something at the thing that was apparently named Rosenkol and it gave a familiar exclamation of, "Jawohl!" before it vanished with the same sound of displacing air that had heralded its arrival.

"The house elf is getting the materials, and then we begin," Master Petri said, sending relief flooding through Harry. So the thing was a house elf, whatever that was. Harry did not particularly care now that he had the right word for it.

He was less relieved when Rosenkol returned with the "materials."

It was a corpse. A human corpse. Harry had to cover his face with his hands to push back his reflex desire to retch.

Master Petri saw his reaction and laughed. He actually laughed. Harry felt even more ill. Even after spending some time with the man and guessing at the kind of things he did, Harry had not quite internalized the fact that Master Petri was not a nice person by any definition. For the first time, he really felt afraid of the man – not the situation, but the man himself – and Master Petri was not even doing anything to _Harry_ or even threatening to do anything.

The corpse was just too much.

"Ach, die Jugend," Master Petri murmured almost fondly under his breath, still chuckling a little. Harry didn't think that his youth had anything to do with his revulsion for the dead body, but was not exactly in a position to make a comment.

Master Petri stepped closer and patted Harry on the shoulder, which did nothing to reassure him. The master snatched the vial of wizard's blood out of Harry's grasp and shot him a small smile. Harry was sure that this was the most cheerful he had ever seen Master Petri, which was problematic in many ways.

"Don't worry, Harry. The first time is hard, so I will do it and you can simply watch, okay?" Master Petri suggested. Harry nodded numbly.

So he watched. He stood there, unable to say or do anything, as Master Petri tapped the vial with his wand, vanishing the stopper. The man retrieved a thin paintbrush from the worktable, cast some kind of spell on it, and then dipped it into the blood and began painting all sorts of patterns on the corpse. When he was finished, the vial of blood was about half empty.

"These are the guide paths for the spells," Master Petri explained. "Not necessary, but because I work with the blood, it is much easier first to prepare. Do you remember why I use the blood?"

Harry was startled out of his stupor by the question. Eager not to ruin Master Petri's good mood and end up having to go any nearer to the corpse, he answered quickly, "Dynamic enchantment uses blood so that it isn't, er, locked."

Master Petri nodded. "Good. That means that the spells can to spread to other targets until they do not have any more power. Also, I use the client's blood so that the spells can be controlled by him."

The general explanation done, Master Petri began casting, moving his wand precisely along the pre-drawn lines and muttering under his breath. When he finished an entire section of marks, all on the right side, he turned and proceeded to tell Harry the function.

"These are spells for moving and controlling movement. The other side is to make it stable. I enchant here an inferi seed. Do you know what that is?"

Since Master Petri had asked, Harry figured it was safe to not know. "No, sir," he replied, shaking his head.

"An inferius is a corpse that walks. To make a group of inferi, one requires an inferi seed to give the enchantment to the other corpses. Therefore one does not need to enchant every corpse," Master Petri explained. Harry's eyes darted back to the corpse, and he felt a shudder of dread at the thought of it moving on its own, despite being dead. "A very expensive but simple order," Master Petri added, rubbing his hands together and rolling his wand between his palms.

With that, he turned back to the soon-to-be-walking corpse and continued casting.

When he finished and the body raised a trembling hand and began pushing itself to its feet, it took every ounce of courage Harry had to keep himself from turning around and running. Master Petri had control of it, he reminded himself. Well, he didn't know that for sure, but it seemed like an obvious assumption.

Indeed, besides standing up, the corpse only shambled around in a circle and made some clawing motions at the air before stopping as Master Petri gave an approving nod. He flicked his wand and it collapsed, crumpling to the ground like the dead body it was supposed to be.

Then Master Petri picked up the vial of wizard blood, reached into the drawer of his worktable for an empty vial, and transferred the contents of the first.

"What are you doing, sir?" Harry asked, his curiosity returned now that the corpse was showing no further signs of movement.

Master Petri smiled again at him, and Harry thought he had grown a little immune to the unsettling effect of it. "Ah yes, here is a very important business advice," he began, "swear right oaths. I have sworn: I will not use this vial of blood for any purpose other than the one stated by the client. After completing the product, I will destroy this vial of blood."

The last part was spoken in clean English with very little trace of Master Petri's usual accent.

Harry glanced askance at the healthy volume of blood in the new vial. It certainly did not look destroyed to him

"The vial of blood certainly cannot exist without vial and blood, right?" Master Petri said cheerfully. He set the used vial on his work table and vanished it with a few flicks of his wand.

Harry admitted to being a little impressed. After all, this was exactly the sort of thing he had done at the Dursleys when they told him to 'get rid of' Dudley's old things.


	4. Assistant

After a few months, Master Petri was sufficiently convinced that Harry could be relied upon to appear in public without trying to run away, so he put Harry up to attending the downstairs enchantment shop during the day. He also finally got Harry a wand, which really pleased Harry, even if he still did not like Master Petri one bit.

Though Harry still could not do any real spells, he had learned how to push some magic through the wand to create a small shower of sparks. According to Master Petri, that was enough to activate the anti-intruder protections on the shop if anyone came in and tried to do something unsavoury.

The wand wasn't new, but Master Petri assured him that if he could make sparks from it, it would work well enough for him. Harry would get his own wand after he was freed from the apprenticeship, which, he thought dismally, might be many, many years in the future, assuming he did not die trying.

It was not exactly a dangerous occupation to be an enchanter's apprentice. Enchantment was just a permanent version of charms, and according to the introductory books Harry had been given, the majority of charms were harmless and helpful. When Master Petri had reviewed the material with him later, he had scoffed disdainfully and then dumped a giant tome describing illegal charms in Harry's lap. Still, it remained the case that charms mistakes were not as deadly as other kinds of mistakes, and were usually easily reversed by the master.

The 'other thing,' however, was another story. Harry had thought at first that the term just referred to the illegal enchantments that Master Petri did discreetly on the side, but after some time spent reluctantly participating in the preparation of 'materials,' Harry could only conclude that, while the art had something to do with enchantment, it should really be considered a separate subject.

Master Petri preferred to teach Harry about the 'other thing' orally, and through practice, never assigning any written tests but simply quizzing him as they worked. Thus it was a long time before Harry finally received a book about it, and by that time, he had already got over his queasiness for corpses and blood. It had taken a lot of patience, and only when Master Petri's tolerance had run thin and he had started cursing Harry in earnest, had Harry finally put in the effort to accept his situation.

Because there was no way out. There hadn't been, really, ever since he had crossed the channel and signed the apprenticeship contract in blood. His life essentially belonged to Master Petri. As long as Master Petri continued to seriously teach him about his craft, Harry had no right to complain or leave, whatever else the man did to him or demanded of him. That was their agreement. Harry hadn't known it at the time, but with his blood, Master Petri could find him and track him down wherever he was, if he so desired.

In the wizarding world, blood was a powerful thing. And even though the Master Enchanter Joachim Petri was just another craft-wizard with a moderately successful little shop, the Master Necromancer was a dangerous wizard who had secreted away the blood of dozens of other dark wizards – in other words, who had some coercive power over dozens of dark wizards, even if they did not know it.

Necromancy. That thing was Master Petri's real craft, the 'other thing,' the highly illegal and unsafe thing that had lost him three apprentices before Harry. Master Petri seemed to have only taken in the unwanted sort, bastard sons and orphans, and when they died they were just as unwanted as when they had lived, so no one asked any funny questions.

But even in death, they were not free. If anything, dying just took away any rights they might have had left over, and turned them from overworked apprentices into slaves. Master Petri practically had their departed souls at his beck and call, and could even stuff them temporarily into bodies when he pleased. They were only pale shadows of their original selves, Harry was told, but though they were reserved and depressed, they could still follow orders.

Several times now, Harry had met Ulrich, the first apprentice, and Aleksandra, the third. Ulrich's spirit had informed him in a dull, morose rasp that the second apprentice, Horst, had been devoured by a dementor, and was no longer with them.

Naturally, Harry had wanted to know what a dementor was, and had then been plagued with nightmares for a week when Master Petri had explained in detail and then hinted that Harry would later have to spend an entire month living in the midst of the soul-sucking fiends to pass a test. Both Ulrich and Aleksandra had died before reaching this point, and the aforementioned Horst had experienced a fate worse than death during it, so Harry was not that optimistic about his chances for success, especially as he was by far the youngest apprentice Master Petri had ever had.

But that did not mean he would give up. Giving up was a foreign concept to him. When everything else was gone, his own willpower was the only thing that was left, and he couldn't let that be taken away from him.

And besides, he did not want to die and become downgraded to Master Petri's servant instead of his apprentice. For now, Harry had some privilege, and the worst of the unsavoury necromancy preparations was left to the dead ex-apprentices and the weird house elf, Rosenkol.

In a book about magical creatures, which Harry had been forced to read after he had made the unforgivable mistake of getting grindylow and kelpie blood confused, Harry had learned that house elves were supposed to be helpful, servile creatures who did all the house work and liked being enslaved. This sounded like the image Master Petri had of a model apprentice, which was a little worrying, but more importantly, it sounded nothing like Rosenkol.

First of all, he looked weird, compared to the pictures of normal elves that Harry had seen. Rosenkol was apparently tall for an elf, though that was not saying much, as he stood at about a meter and was still shorter than Harry. He always wore a torn-off piece of a funeral shroud, though he had different outfits for each day of the week. The reason he had so much variety to choose from was that his primary purpose was grave-robbing. Rosenkol's bulging, perpetually wide eyes were coloured a dull, deep black. Harry would have thought that Rosenkol himself was a corpse that Master Petri had put back together had he not seen for himself that the elf lived and breathed.

And then there was the personality. If there was anything servile about Rosenkol, it wasn't naturally so. He bowed and scraped to Master Petri, and always spoke to him with awed reverence, but he was curt and even snooty with anyone else. Rosenkol definitely thought himself above Harry, and given the kind of magic he had seen the elf do, Harry could only reluctantly agree. It probably wouldn't be anything impressive for an adult wizard, but Harry was limited to uncontrollable effects coming out only when he was under great duress, while Rosenkol could charm and apparate with a snap of his fingers.

Also, Rosenkol had no idea how to cook, so that kind of thing was left to Harry, as if _Harry_ were the house elf. Harry did not know whether it made it better or worse that Master Petri was unbelievably miserly, and sometimes had them subsisting on cheap nutritive potions for weeks without seeing a sliver of real food. Harry felt his stomach churn just thinking about it.

The tinkling of the unnecessarily cheerful bell enchantment on the door pulled Harry from his spiral of depressive thoughts. It was nearing closing time, which meant that the majority of the day's customers had already come through, so the new entrance was unexpected. Harry glanced up and saw an unfamiliar, rich-looking blond wizard accompanied by a boy around Harry's age, probably his son. The man seemed taken aback at the sight of Harry, and Harry remembered that it was not so common for young children to be apprentices. Actually, most children his age were still playing happily at home, ignorant of even the basics of magic theory. Harry would have thought himself lucky, except that his master was actually a horrible person who blithely exploited and ruined the lives of small children, among other unspeakable deeds.

Putting his limited German to the test, Harry said, uncertainly, "Ich bin der Lehrling des Herrn Petris," explaining that he was the apprentice of Master Petri. He hoped that the possessive actually had that last 's' at the end. Then he used the stock, _"May I help you?"_ phrase that he had been taught, "Darf ich Ihnen behilflich sein?"

As soon as the words left his mouth automatically, his mind raced wildly, trying to recall if he had used the right formality. From the grammar books that Master Petri had finally provided him, Harry knew that German had formal and informal forms, but because he spent ninety percent of his day talking to Master Petri familiarly, the words sometimes just slipped out that way even when he intended otherwise.

All his worrying turned out to be completely unnecessary, however, because the first words out of the aristocratic blond's mouth were, "Pardon me, do you speak English?"

Harry gave a relieved little smile and nodded. "Of course, sir. How may I help you then? I'm the apprentice of the Master Enchanter here."

Expectedly, the man looked surprised at that, but answered, "May I see your master, then? I was told he made normalized fairy powder here, for the Draught of Acuity."

Harry recognised the key-phrase for the 'other thing' at once. That meant that this man was a returning client, though one that Harry had never met before. According to Master Petri, it was complete nonsense: anyone who knew a lick about potion-making and enchanted objects knew that normalized _anything_ would at best lose its potency and at worst explode violently if put in contact with a still-brewing potion. Harry took his word for it.

Usually, he would tell the customer off for being daft and then direct them through the floo, writing down what was ostensibly the floo address of an apothecary on a special slip. The charmed parchment would actually show the client the floo address of Master Petri's necromancy workshop (the attic), while appearing to anyone else as the address for the apothecary in the next alley. This process was necessary every time because Master Petri's paranoia had made him enchant his fireplace to wipe the memory of the address from anyone who went through it. Harry was surprised that that was the only thing the fireplace did, but perhaps there were more safeguards that he did not know about.

The purpose of the key-phrase and the charmed paper was to enable the 'special business' to be done in broad daylight, right in the middle of a shop full of customers looking at harmless, legal enchantments. Since no one else was in the shop, Harry just gave up the pretence and nodded at the man without saying anything, scribbling down the appropriate address.

He handed over the slip of parchment, glancing at the boy beside the client as he did so. "He will be right with you, sir, in the usual place. Would you like to leave your son here while you deal with Master Petri?" He tried to give the man a meaningful look, and worried that he had only succeeded in appearing constipated. A necromancer's workshop was hardly a place for a boy of nine, unless that boy was an unwanted orphan who was the victim of ruthless exploitation. Harry doubted the Dursleys had even noticed his disappearance.

The man looked a little amused, in a sneering, snobbish way, but nodded. "That would be preferable, thank you."

Harry nodded back and watched as the man gave a parting, "Behave, Draco," to his son before he tossed a handful of powder in the fire and was whirled away by the roaring green flames.

"Hi, I'm Malfoy, Draco Malfoy," said the boy. "Are you really learning magic already?"

"Sort of," Harry admitted, not looking forward to hedging around the concept of necromancy. How could he explain that he knew how to prepare a corpse to become an inferius, or how to cause pain to ghosts, but not how to do a simple levitation charm? Master Petri had said that Harry was still too young even for that, and should stick to theory and wandless magic for now, in order to avoid stunting the growth of his magical flow. Heavy use of a wand anchored the magical flow through a body, amplifying it and making it easier to control, but also stopping it from growing or shrinking as much. In most people, the flow peaked a bit after age ten, which was why most magical schooling began at eleven.

Harry had to admit that Master Petri was very knowledgeable, even if he was also a sadistic madman. And despite having to do servant-like tasks for Master Petri, Harry _was_ actually learning a lot about magic, which was an improvement over having to do servant-like things for free.

"What do you mean sort of? And what's your name?" Malfoy pressed, which made Harry realize that he had rudely neglected to introduce himself.

"Harry Potter," he replied. To his surprise, Malfoy's eyes widened and he looked like he would have gaped, had his breeding not been as good.

" _T_ _he_ Harry Potter?" Malfoy asked.

"I'm sorry, what?" Harry said dumbly. Malfoy's tone had implied that there was some kind of famous person also named Harry Potter, and that this celebrity was probably around Harry's age. There was no way that Harry was famous though, so that was a weird coincidence.

"You know, Harry Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived, who defeated You-Know-Who!" Malfoy said, as if all of that were obvious. Harry was blown away by the number of hyphenated things in that one sentence.

"I don't think I know what you're talking about," he admitted. He thought of something. "Is it a British thing?"

At this, Draco Malfoy seemed to remember that he was in a foreign country. "Oh, well, yes. You-Know-Who, the Dark Lord – we don't say his name – was defeated by a baby named Harry Potter. He should be our age now. But of course it can't be you. He's English too, obviously."

Harry decided not to mention the fact that, up to a few months ago, he had been living in English suburbia in complete ignorance of magic. How common was the name Harry Potter? Muggle-Harry would have said very, but given the sorts of names that wizards tended to have, wizard-Harry was not so sure.

"Right," was all Harry said. There was an awkward silence for a few moments.

"So, do you like flying?" Malfoy asked him then with a complete change of subject. Harry shrugged slowly, trying his best not to react strangely. Was Malfoy talking about aeroplanes? Somehow, Harry doubted it, from the way the blond boy spoke of it like a recreational activity. Harry wouldn't put it past wizards at all to be able to cast a flying spell for fun. Wasn't that just like levitating oneself?

"I don't know, I haven't tried it," he answered honestly, after a pause. When Malfoy looked horrified by the very possibility, Harry added, hoping that he had not mucked up something major, "Master Petri doesn't let me out much."

Fortunately, Malfoy looked somewhat appeased by this. It was true anyway that Harry had had very little free time ever since the start of his apprenticeship. Since Harry had never been one to have much opportunity to putter around with toys, the way Master Petri occupied every hour of his day with lessons or servant work did not bother him too much. However, he supposed that normal children had very different schedules.

"You really must try it some time," Malfoy said. "It's the best thing in the world."

With that kind of recommendation, Harry could only awkwardly nod and say, "I will if I get the chance."

"So what do you do all the time then?" Malfoy asked him.

"Read," Harry said succinctly and vaguely. Before Malfoy could think of more difficult questions to ask, the fireplace flared green and Malfoy Senior appeared, swinging his snake-head cane.

"Come along, Draco," the man said, before pausing to give Harry a nod. Then he took his son's hand, and swept around gracefully to step outside, ignoring Draco's whinging protests. As soon as they cleared the wards, they disappeared.

Harry was left blinking at how quickly the entire transaction seemed to have gone. He twisted around as another pillar of green fire roared from the previously empty grate and revealed Master Petri there.

"Close the shop. Leave everything. We have a new project from Mister Malfoy," Master Petri said in German. There was barely-concealed excitement leaking through in his voice and a pinched expression of glee on his face.

"How much?" Harry asked in the same language, a little dryly. He took out his wand and prodded one of the enchanted figurines on the counter, which would take care of the shop. The entire building locked down and the brightly glowing sign on the display window up front changed to: "GESCHLOSSEN."

"Five thousand galleons," Master Petri exclaimed in ecstasy. Even while Harry laughed internally at the expression on the man's face, he had to admit that Master Petri had truly been offered a small fortune to do whatever it was. Perhaps after this, Master Petri would get a little more generous, though Harry doubted it as soon as he had the thought.

"What is it then?" Harry asked, once it seemed like Master Petri had calmed down a little.

"Dangerous," he said, and then added, in English, "We must dig up a very volatile spirit and bind it if possible. First we need to make preparations for you. I do not want you to die yet."

Harry did not know whether he should find this declaration heartwarming. He decided to wait for the ulterior motive to show itself first.

"What kinds of preparations?" he inquired.

"The second step to understanding the Other," Master Petri began, and this time, Harry could hear the emphasis on that word, "You must make a horcrux."


	5. Victim

"I will perform the horcrux ritual for you, because it is very complex," Master Petri told Harry as he reclined on his wooden chair. The cheap, knobbly thing looked like it would stab the seated person in nine different places, but was actually enchanted to have perfect support for whomever sat in it. Harry got to sit on the hard, decidedly non-enchanted floor. "But," Master Petri continued, "There is one thing you must do yourself, which is split your soul."

That sounded a little alarming to Harry, so he asked obligingly, "How do you do that, sir?"

"You commit an unspeakable act, and accept it. Murder is the usual," Master Petri explained coolly. Harry stared, not completely shocked, for half of the things that came out of Master Petri's mouth were at about an equal level of horribleness. Still, this was plainly outrageous.

Harry took a breath, gathered up his courage, and then said, "I can't do that." He felt the urge to look away as soon as he had said it, but when he caught Master Petri's dark eyes, decided to hold that gaze defiantly.

To his surprise, Master Petri did not curse him or hit him or any of the usual things he did when Harry disobeyed or contradicted him. Instead, he simply said, levelly, "I know that. Later we can improve that weakness. For now, there are other acts. For you I believe that killing a unicorn is right."

To hear "right" and something as awful-sounding as "killing a unicorn" in the same sentence made Harry's stomach churn, but a guilty part of himself could not help admitting that it sounded a sight better than murdering a human.

"Are unicorns sentient?" Harry asked. He had to know this first.

Master Petri smiled his leering smile. "No," was the reply, but Harry realised that he had no way of confirming the truth value of that response. Master Petri had every reason to lie, if it were not in fact true, so the question and its answer had been effectively useless.

As if reading his mind, Master Petri extended his wand and gave it a sharp flick, summoning a thin book from one of the shelves in the back of the workshop, behind the filing drawers. He tossed it to Harry, who caught it reflexively and looked down. _Licht des Einhorns_ , read the title. _Light of the Unicorn._

Hesitantly, Harry looked back up at Master Petri to determine what he should do next. He wanted to refuse in principle to do anything that could be called "unspeakable," but that was not an option. Master Petri would probably be willing to massacre a million children for five thousand galleons. Actually, Harry would bet that Master Petri would have no problems doing something like that just for fun. It wasn't a nice thought, especially since it could actually be true. In any case, the man would have no compunctions at all about forcing Harry, perhaps by altering his mind or something else awful.

The book in his hands. . . Master Petri had given Harry a choice, which was already more generous than usual. It would be foolish not to consider it, at least.

"I'll read the book, and then decide," Harry said, sounding more confident than he felt.

Something strange glinted in Master Petri's eye, and Harry did not have enough time to even imagine what it could possibly be before it hit him.

" _Crucio!_ " The incantation was spoken forcefully, unlike any of Master Petri's other spells. The red light flashed. Harry screamed before he felt anything.

It crawled inside him, a surge of terrible, searing fire, and his lungs and mouth were filled up with sand and it hurt to scream and he screamed from the hurt but now he had no surface anymore, there was too much to comprehend, it was just like unconsciousness, this could not be consciousness it could not exist, not so inexorable and inescapably grasping, a mess of strangling bewilderment, and -

It stopped, and the eternal moment shattered and faded away so that even his chasing grasp could no longer catch it. Harry woke up as if from a dream, or he resurfaced from the bottom of a shallow pool. He felt light, and heavy. His head and his body were at odds. He licked his lips and tested himself.

There was no sand, and no fire. He felt fine, and the way he felt fine was the worst perversion in the world. Master Petri was standing now, a pillar of darkness above him. Harry looked up at Master Petri's eyes, saw the light of joy, the crescent glint of pleasure, and felt hate for an infinitesimal moment. Then it disappeared, lost to the same place as the pain.

Master Petri collected himself. Harry was already collected, lying on his back, somehow having turned around in all his convulsing. He did not really care to move. He asked _why,_ but it was only silently.

Master Petri answered: "That is another method. It is a little bit unreliable. One never knows which one shatters first. Mind or soul?"

Somehow, when Master Petri took the time to repeat his sentence casually in German, everything began to seem surreal. Harry shuddered, his whole body giving one violent shake.

A million thoughts began to race through his head, chains of realisation and horror. There was the thought, horcrux. Splitting the soul. Murder. Torture.

"Using the curse," Harry said, the twinge of rawness in his throat surprising him. He remembered that he had been screaming, and that the screaming had been real. "Does that work too?"

His question drew a laugh from Master Petri. That wasn't right. Harry had not wanted to make the man laugh.

"It might. Only if one cannot take it back," was the reply. Harry wondered what that even meant. How could anyone ever take something back, once it was done? He remembered what Master Petri said a few moments ago about shattering. He thought he understood, maybe.

"How long was I. . . under?" he asked.

"Five seconds," Master Petri replied.

Harry felt cold. Had it really been five seconds? Only five seconds? The world seemed to loom over him, darker and greater. Master Petri was unfathomably tall. Some indeterminate amount of time passed like that, in a hazy confusion.

"Auf!" the man barked suddenly, turning away a little. A command to get up, for Harry had been shamefully lying on the floor for too long. He could see the tip of Master Petri's wand from the corner of his eye, and he did not want to admit it, but lying to himself was no use. He was afraid, and powerless. He rolled over, finding his body only in a little pain from where his bones must have knocked against the hard floor, and got to his feet, though not before picking up the unicorn book that had fallen out of his hands before.

"Der Cruciatus-Fluch," Master Petri began, and Harry's exhausted mind gave a silent scream of protest at having to comprehend these unfamiliar words, "ist ein Fluch, der das Opfer einer unerträglichen Folter unterzieht."

It was a testament to the sort of things that Master Petri dealt with on a day to day basis that Harry knew the word, "Folter," intimately. Torture. It was the only word he really needed to know to understand the purpose of the cruciatus curse. The other words helped a little. "Unbearable torture" was the right phrase, and it completed the concept. Simple pain could be resisted. Pain was not the same thing as torture. What might break one person could be laughed off by another. But no one could bear "unbearable" or mistake "torture."

Knowing that, Harry could not imagine suffering through it again, though he had tasted it just a minute ago. The memory was already distant and dreamlike. Even if he remembered it perfectly it would be meaningless, just a jumble of confusion. The pain was gone, impossible to preserve in a moment. He had only come out of it with a conviction that it could not happen again.

To inflict that feeling on someone else: that would be even worse. Harry did not doubt that it would truly be unspeakable. But even Master Petri could not deserve this unfathomable pain.

Suddenly, without even needing to open the book in his limp hands, Harry knew that it was the only way. He would have to kill a unicorn.

He wanted to throw it away, that useless, pointless book, but he knew that he should at least read it, if only to know what there was to know. He owed his future victim that much.

"I'll do it," Harry said, holding out a book a little to show what he meant. He said it in German, even, to show that he was serious, even if he was incompetent at it.

"In the end, it is just an animal," Master Petri answered, each word sharp and crisp and easy to understand.

 _In the end, even people were just animals,_ Harry thought. But he said nothing.


	6. Poacher

As reluctant as Harry was to admit it, Master Petri had been right.

A unicorn really _was_ just an animal. It was a magical animal, certainly, with special magical properties, but was even less intelligent than its non-magical cousin, the horse. It operated almost solely on magic.

People said that the unicorn was a symbol of everything good and pure.

Master Petri said that the unicorn was a symbol of faulty instincts.

Standing next to a pure white mare, softly stroking its bristly fur, and in general feeling like an utter ingrate, Harry could not help agreeing a little with Master Petri. He almost wanted the unicorn to run, or, even better, to kick him to death with its powerful hooves or stab him with that sabre-sharp horn. But it only whickered softly and continued to graze.

Earlier, in a very clinical manner, Master Petri had already explained the precise order of things that he should do in order to very nearly guarantee success.

First, they had arrived in the magical part of the Black Forest. Unicorns needed very high concentrations of magic to survive, so a place like that, apparently infested with every kind of magical creature imaginable, had the most unicorn blessings in the world. As a bonus, it was also in Germany, which meant that there had been no turbulent international portkeys to speak of.

For his part, Master Petri put some rudimentary protective charms on a clearing and then cast a Patronus Charm before he left Harry alone with the guardian animal, a gleaming silver owl.

Most dark wizards were incapable of casting the Patronus Charm, but Master Petri could, he had explained with some pride, also unabashedly calling himself a dark wizard in the process. Not that Harry hadn't already been certain of his darkness, given the requirements of necromancy. Apparently, Master Petri had been a Master Enchanter long before he had even begun learning the "other thing," and one never forgot how to cast the Patronus Charm after the first time.

Harry wondered what happy memory Master Petri thought of as he cast the spell. Torturing children, perhaps?

At any rate, one of the things the Patronus Charm, which was a magical manifestation of happiness, was useful for was attracting things that liked happiness.

Master Petri had remorselessly told Harry that that meant it would attract both unicorns and dementors. He had let Harry stew in horror for a few more minutes before taking pity and informing him that the Patronus Charm was also simultaneously a defence against dementors, as it would harmlessly reroute their depressing aura and could physically attack them.

Harry had not been too offended at being misled, given the usual level of kindness he expected from the capricious master, and had pretended with as much dignity as he could that it had never happened. Still, standing in the middle of the clearing unarmed and guarded only by a shiny owl made of happy light was a little disconcerting.

The unicorn had not taken too long to show up. While Harry had been waiting, Master Petri had no doubt been scouring the forest for one of the creatures to drive away from its blessing and toward Harry's clearing.

Harry could have killed it minutes ago, but his heart was thudding painfully in his chest and he felt a little ill about the whole thing. As Master Petri had predicted, the unicorn could not sense Harry's miserably weak intent to kill under the overpowering and sympathetic radiance of the Patronus.

The more Harry touched it, the more he realised how horrible it would be to deprive this magnificent beast of life. It was wild, innocent, and untainted.

Hand clenched around the weapon of choice in his pocket, Harry reminded himself of Master Petri's sardonic smile and unflinching wand. The world was not good and pure. The world was not a place for something like a unicorn to exist. What was really good, and really evil? Did the unicorn understand?

It couldn't. It was just a beast with no higher power of reason past instinct. It knew that good was galloping freely through the woods, and bad was pain. This kind of simplicity did not fit into the world of humans.

What was the point of sparing the unicorn's good at the sacrifice of Harry's good? An animal would not understand or appreciate it. The thought sounded selfish and cruel, even unformed inside his head, and he wanted to feel guilty, but even that was not granted him. The guilt did not come. Harry's grasp around the little lump of stone in his pocket tightened so much that the jagged corners dug into his flesh and drew blood.

The unicorn whinnied and shifted a little, no doubt smelling the injury.

The only thing he felt: it was guilt for not feeling guilty. But the natural question, then, was _why_? Why, then, did he think that he should feel guilty at all? Where was the reason?

The reason? Reason? The word chased itself around the empty, unresponsive caverns of his mind. Harry took his hand out of his pocket, though it was unnecessary, and pressed his magic into the black stone, like he had practised with Master Petri over and over again. He needed to see it happen.

There was not much to see to tell him that he had succeeded, except the most obvious thing, which was horrific enough to prove the success of Master Petri's enchantment.

The unicorn, finally sensing the change in Harry, turned tail and tried to bolt. But even as it lifted its hooves, the ethereal grace left it and it crashed down, its legs twisting as it scrambled in vain to balance. The clearing was cast in a sinister darkness – the Patronus had gone out within a second of the Nullifier's activation.

Unicorns needed magic to survive. This, Harry had learned from the unicorn book. They were not magical horses; they were horse-shaped magical creatures. Many of the vital systems inside a unicorn's body ran on ambient magic the way the bodies of other living creatures ran on air. The unicorn itself was magical, and could theoretically sustain itself for up to hours without the ambient magic, but only if the change was gradual, as would happen with a migration through non-magical land.

The Nullifier had a very nearly instantaneous effect. It sucked away all the free-floating magic in the area until it reached its capacity, which was more than enough for this one clearing. The result was a sudden magical vacuum, and the highly magical unicorn's body went into shock. Even Harry felt some kind of visceral weakness from the sudden lack.

Watching the creature collapse and feeling a little numb, Harry continued to act out the plan, unable to process any other thoughts with his mind. He stepped over to the unresponsive unicorn's head and reached for the horn. For a moment, he hoped it would buck forward and perhaps gore him, but the animal did nothing of the sort, only watching blankly. Holding up the now-warm Nullifier, he angled it so that the sharp side was pointing down and then struck the base of the horn. It was a well-known trick to break off a unicorn horn, and used often by poachers and legal harvesters alike. The stab of a horn did a lot of damage, but because of its backward surface ridges, it was difficult to remove if embedded in something, so the attachment was brittle enough that a swing of the head could break it off. A defence mechanism. On a healthy unicorn, the horn would grow back within a day.

Harry took the horn in hand and reversed it. As if it knew what was to come, the unicorn twitched slightly, but its whole body still seemed frozen by the sudden loss of the magic that gave it strength and life.

The horn plunged down.

Viscous silver blood splashed onto Harry's hands and quickly dimmed to a pale blue in the magic-starved environment. Unicorn's blood carried a powerful curse, but the Nullifier would get rid of it as long as none of it went inside Harry's body, where there was magic to fuel it. Still, it felt like something horrible and oppressive had crept inside him, squeezing his insides until finally they shattered under the strain.

He looked down at the weakly shuddering body of the once-magnificent creature. Soon, even the last laboured rise and fall of the great chest stilled. Harry's wide eyes drank in the sight.

He felt nothing.


	7. Stranger

Harry stared down at the teardrop-shaped shard of black stone in his hands. Somehow, it had felt appropriate to house the fruits of the unicorn's sacrifice in the very device that had killed it. It wasn't a Nullifier anymore; that sort of enchantment was one use only. Now, it was something much worse.

A horcrux.

He supposed it was lucky that the ex-Nullifier had satisfied the requirements for a horcrux – that it be of emotional significance and capable of containing something. Calling anything about a horcrux lucky seemed intellectually disgusting, however.

Even though Master Petri spoke of horcruxes as if they were nothing special, Harry knew on a gut level that it was an awful thing, a perversion. Anything whose creation involved an _unspeakable act_ had to be, by the definition of unspeakable. And who knew what else it had required? Harry had been unconscious for the entire process after the unicorn's death, and Master Petri remained tight-lipped about the details.

Harry did not feel any different, but his feelings had to be lying to him. He knew with all his mind that he was different now from how he had been before, but it was impossible to evaluate his memories with anything but the feelings he had now, in the present. He couldn't remember anymore what it had been like to be himself before the horcrux. One never really remembered that kind of thing, but usually the change from day to day was not so great, so the feelings that came with memories still seemed true.

Not his. They were too different, too false. He felt vaguely sick all the time, but could find no reason for it. It did not cause any physical reaction either, not like a real sickness.

Master Petri had told him that it was normal.

Suddenly, Master Petri had simultaneously become more reasonable and more detestable. Both changes were in Harry's head, he was sure of it, but that did not make them any less real.

Before the horcrux ritual, Harry had been sure that something would go wrong, even if he did manage to complete his "unspeakable act." How could he manage to accept it once it was done? How could he possibly avoid feeling remorse? It had seemed unimaginable.

Master Petri had told him, almost flippantly, not to worry about it.

And he had been right. It was getting easier, day by day, to admit to himself how _right_ Master Petri was all the time. The things that he said, which had once seemed so foreign and impossible to Harry, had become clear and sensible.

What could possibly be the point of remorse? It was simply the weakness of indecision that haunted one even after completing a task. But the window of possible change had long closed. The things that he felt about the past were quite simply inconsequential, so it was best not to feel them if there was no reason to.

The feelings used to just come to him, Harry could vaguely recall. Even if he had thought about them, they would not get any better. It was better now. He was better now.

"What am I supposed to do with this?" Harry asked Master Petri, not even turning around. The meaning of the question was clear enough, but his disrespect was plain to see. Harry didn't care.

The searing, fiery trails of pain that scored themselves all over his back sent him to his knees, but drew no reaction other than a physical one. Harry waited for his pounding heart and heavy breathing to even out.

"Forgive my disrespect, sir," he said tonelessly, this much at least coming easily in the native tongue of Master Petri. This time facing the man properly and keeping his head down, Harry looked up through his lashes in time to see the withdrawing wand. He held out the hand with his horcrux and clasped the other one over it. Perhaps his posture was a little too submissive, to the point of mockery, but it could not be faulted.

He used to become angry over this, this asking – begging – for forgiveness for trivialities from an unforgiving teacher, but now he simply hated it. It felt liberating to properly acknowledge how much he loathed Master Petri, the man who was always right, even when he was wrong.

To feel this emotion was allowed, proper, even. But to wallow in it would be useless. He needed to do something for himself, and act on that hatred. His contract with Master Petri would end, and Harry would not be the dead body at the of it, nor the withered spirit, nor the victim.

To have such designs at all was perhaps reckless, and to carry them out impossible, but Harry had nothing if not determination.

He would take everything he could from Master Petri, and then destroy him.

"Sir, how do I protect my horcrux?" Harry asked, keeping his voice steady.

"You must hide it, so that no one will ever find it," was the answer.

What was the best hiding place? Somewhere close to him, so he could know if it was taken away? But guarding it would be difficult. He could not even use any wand magic yet. How could he possibly keep something so important safe?

He couldn't, but the protections did not all have to come from him. Master Petri wanted him to hide it where no one could find it. What was the best hiding place?

Ignorance.

If no one knew what it was, then even one who found it would not pose a danger. But there was a chance that there were magical ways to figure out its nature, ways which Harry did not know of, because truly his knowledge of magic was not very great at all. So he could not simply leave it lying about in the middle of nowhere.

"The ocean," Harry said, coming to a sudden epiphany. The horcrux would resist non-magical and low magical damage, as well as most basic spells, he already knew this. If he dropped it into the middle of the ocean, no one could stumble upon it. No one would know where it was, not even him or Master Petri. It needed no protections other than obscurity. It needed no magic to become lost.

"A very good idea," Master Petri said, and Harry thought he sounded genuinely impressed. Harry would have asked Master Petri what he had done with his own, but that would probably have earned him another lashing curse. One was enough for a day.

The only problem was that the ocean was rather far away. Harry could entrust his horcrux to Master Petri and ask him to make several apparition trips, but frankly, Harry did not trust Master Petri to do anything more than teach him as their contract stipulated. He most certainly did not trust the man with a piece of his soul.

Though if he thought about it, in allowing Master Petri to complete the horcrux ritual for him in the first place, Harry supposed that he had already done just that. He would not put it past Master Petri to have done something to his horcrux. It was well within possibility, since as a necromancer Master Petri dealt with souls routinely, and knew a lot about them.

With a sinking heart, Harry realised that, actually, it was overwhelmingly likely that Master Petri _had_ done something to his horcrux. If the man had any designs about Harry's soul, he would certainly have already carried them out. What was one more gesture of trust, when trust had never existed in the first place? It was silly, but Harry was tired.

"Please drop my horcrux deep in the ocean for me, then, sir," Harry requested. His hand shook slightly as he tried to hold it out, and he had to pause for a moment to steady it.

He wasn't a gullible child. Not anymore, anyway. Harry wanted to say this all to Master Petri's face, because the expression on it right now was too pleased and he hated it, but Harry knew that now was not the time. Every advantage that he had over Master Petri, he had to keep. It was the only way he could win.

Master Petri took the chunk of iron in hand and slipped it into his robe pocket. Harry felt bare, and he wanted desperately to ask if that was really a safe place to put it for now, but he held his tongue on that front.

Instead, he asked, "That was the preparation for Malfoy's task, right, sir? Are we going to start it now?"

It felt a little strange to say "we," because every other time he had been involved in the "special business," he had played a very small, mostly educational role that Master Petri easily could have done himself. This time, however, he had gone to the extreme of splitting his soul and having part of it put in an object. Harry knew that it was a big step toward learning necromancy, really learning it instead of dabbling in low-level inferi-raising, and knew that it meant his apprenticeship was beginning to get serious.

"Yes, we are," Master Petri confirmed. "This will be simple necromancy, if we are lucky, but that is unlikely."

This was the first time Master Petri had said that word, Harry noticed. Necromancy. It was almost like he used it as a subset of the "other," however, instead of a synonym. Harry waited patiently for clarification.

"It is divination, another use of the other. It is the third kind. You made the horcrux because it is needed to understand the second kind, which is needed to use the third kind, and we have no time for full teaching now," Master Petri said.

"You mean the horcrux was part of conjuration, sir?" Harry asked, failing to see how splitting his soul and putting it in a rock was conjuring anything. He had known vaguely about the three forms of the "other," and known that everything he had tried thus far was enchantment, the first form. The way Master Petri sometimes summoned the dead apprentices was a combination of the first two forms, enchantment and conjuration.

Master Petri gave a jerky nod. "The truth of souls," he said, "the important knowledge of conjuration. The rest is technique, what one can learn from practicing."

Harry nodded, sensing that this topic would preferably be postponed for now. He could learn it after Master Petri got his five thousand galleons from Malfoy. He hoped that Master Petri would be happy for a long time after that. There were two things that could light up that man's eyes: dead people and gold, the latter surprisingly more than the former.

Harry wondered what had happened to Master Petri to make him so greedy and miserly. While it was true that Harry had always been treated like a second-class citizen at the Dursleys, he knew he still had not exactly lived like a poor person. Even Dudley's cast-offs were high-quality and practically still new, if far too big, and Harry had had a place to stay and food to eat, even if it was far less food than Dudley. Since he had hardly been envious of the miniature-whale's girth, Harry supposed he could not say it had been completely bad.

Master Petri wasn't poor. He had Harry check the arithmetic on his account books sometimes as life-skills practice, and Harry knew that the man could be placed on the lower end of well-to-do. As an enchanter, he made enough money for a decent living, and the "other thing" brought in periodic influxes of large amounts of gold, since his clients paid a premium for discretion and a vow of quality. Yet, he never spent any of that money, keeping it locked up in a Gringotts savings account and living on the bare minimum. This practice frankly mystified Harry, but at least it made Master Petri easier to deal with whenever he got the opportunity to hoard more galleons away.

Master Petri rubbed his hands together. "To use necromancy, one must find a spirit that is close to the target," he began.

Harry took advantage of the pause to ask an important question: "Who is the target, sir? You never said."

"A man called Lord Voldemort. He was a British dark lord," Master Petri replied, adding, "perhaps the most powerful of them all."

Harry did not know exactly what a dark lord was, but he could guess that it was not anything good, maybe something like an ultra-dark wizard, which perhaps explained why Master Petri had repeatedly emphasised how dangerous this task would be. Harry wouldn't put it past a powerful dark wizard to be able to do nasty things even from the grave.

"Malfoy has said that his father would be a likely person to ask. Probably he was a follower of this dark lord. His name is Abraxas Malfoy. I will conjure him but you must do the necromancy."

"What?" Harry demanded, a belated, "Sir?" coming a moment later. Seeing that Master Petri was unimpressed, he revised his question a little, "Why me, sir? I've never, er, done something like that."

"There must be a first time, right?" Master Petri answered a little wryly. Harry waited for some kind of elaboration, and was not disappointed, for after a pause, the man continued, "You are English and Abraxas Malfoy was English, so he will naturally want more to speak to you. He probably knew your parents. There are not so many English purebloods."

Harry tried not to panic, and when he failed not to panic, he hoped that Master Petri attributed it to nervousness about a new task. Because Harry was sure that the game would be up now, when it was revealed that Harry was just another mudblood. Master Petri always complained about how mudbloods were taking over with their superior numbers, so it was just unlikely that Harry's parents had actually been wizards. Besides, would wizards get themselves killed in a car crash or have relatives as quintessentially muggle as the Dursleys? Harry got the impression that wizards like Master Petri barely even knew what cars _were,_ let alone drove them.

But he had no choice. Refusing would be even worse than getting found out. Maybe he would not be found out, if he was lucky. Also he had some limited immortality because of his horcrux. Then Harry remembered that his horcrux was currently in Master Petri's pocket.

The horror.

"Don't look so pale. This part is not the dangerous part. If you fail, I will complete it," Master Petri reassured. Harry nodded, knowing that there was nothing to do but pray for luck.

Master Petri stepped over to his blood cabinet and Harry watched a little listlessly as he withdrew a thin, unusually ornate vial.

"This is Lucius Malfoy's blood," Master Petri said, lifting his wand and tapping the wooden stopper. It popped out neatly and he levitated it absently over to one of the worktables. "The conjuration is easy with the right things. The corpse, for example, or even a bone, but Malfoy does not wish to," he paused, though Harry was uncertain whether it was to search for a word or due to scorn, "desecrate his father's body."

Harry decided it was scorn. He wanted to credit Lucius Malfoy with some points for annoying Master Petri with "pointless principles," except that Harry found it increasingly easier to see where Master Petri was coming from. If Malfoy was paying a dark wizard to interrogate the departed spirit of his father like this, then he ought not pretend with sentimentalities like the sanctity of a corpse.

"The son shares much magic with the father, so anything of Malfoy's body is still useful. But you know the advice," Master Petri said.

"Always ask for blood," Harry replied dutifully. Knowing how much magic could be done with different sorts of wizard's blood, especially willingly given blood, Harry was always surprised by how unconcerned clients seemed to be about giving it to Master Petri. Were they really that confident about sworn oaths? It did not seem that difficult to get around most oaths, as Master Petri had demonstrated time and again.

"So, I will tell you the truth of souls now, and you will believe me, because you have experienced it." Master Petri said suddenly.

Harry looked up attentively, half in excitement, half in trepidation. What was this knowledge that he had already paid so much for, largely unwillingly?

"There is no such thing as a soul," Master Petri pronounced with gravity.

Harry stared, uncomprehending. He only barely refrained from saying something stupid, because the look on Master Petri's face said that stupidity would not be tolerated. There were the obvious protests. Souls existed, because Master Petri summoned them all the time. Souls existed, because Harry had just split his soul and had it put in an object.

Or had he? What did he know, _know for certain_ , that he had done?

He had killed a unicorn, allegedly to give himself a second chance at life, if the first one happened to go wrong. He had been unconscious for twelve hours afterwards, and there was no telling what had gone on in that time. He had emerged, feeling noticeably different.

He thought about the very little he knew of what a horcrux actually did. It stored a "fragment of soul," but Harry realised that that meant approximately nothing, if he really tried to understand it. If Harry were to be killed in a way that did not damage his body, he would immediately be restored to life and the horcrux spent, no matter where it was – the functional second chance. If he had died from damage to his body, some other preparations, unknown to him, would be needed, but the idea was essentially the same.

If he took Master Petri's word for it, that souls did not exist, then Harry supposed that he could see how the same things could be true with no mention of souls at all. That is, he still had no idea what was going on, because he had never had any idea about what was going on in the first place.

"I don't know _anything_ ," he finally said with some frustration, forgetting Master Petri's presence for a moment. He was reminded of it by a snort.

"Why are you so afraid of dementors? Of the dementor's kiss?" Master Petri asked him in what seemed like a complete non sequitur.

Harry had the feeling that a response like _"They suck out souls!"_ would not be acceptable. "You told me, sir, that it's a fate worse than death to be kissed, that they leave your body an empty shell and then you're trapped in darkness for years until they digest you. Why wouldn't I be afraid?" Something else occurred to him, and he felt bullheaded enough at the moment to say it aloud. "If souls don't exist, how come you can't conjure Horst? Isn't it because his soul has been eaten?"

Master Petri laughed, and Harry felt extraordinarily belittled. The man was supposed to be angry because Harry had made a point. If he laughed, it only meant that Harry was wrong to the point of ridiculousness.

"I noticed that you separated your body from your identity. So you would agree that a dementor traps you inside itself?" Master Petri said.

Harry nodded a little jerkily, not trusting himself to speak in a pertinent tone. He could already sense that he was being boxed in by a vastly superior arguer, and he hated it.

"If I obliviated you right now, would you still be you?" Master Petri pressed.

"Obliviated?" Harry asked. It sounded familiar, so it was probably a charm he had seen in a book, but he hardly remembered everything he read.

"The memory charm. It's meant to erase only pieces of memories, but it can easily be abused or miscast to erase everything. But nobody has ever claimed that the memory charm harms one's soul," explained Master Petri. Harry's eyes were wide in horror at the end of it.

He felt his face twist up awfully as he thought through all the things Master Petri had just said. He could see already where it was going. If forgetting everything was the death of identity but not the soul, and the dementor's kiss moved the soul without killing identity, then that meant, at the very best, that the soul could exist without identity, but identity could not necessarily exist without the soul.

The pieces fell into place.

"But if I have to split my soul to make a horcrux, wouldn't I lose a part of myself?" Harry blurted frantically.

Master Petri smiled patiently. "If you die, say, from the killing curse, your horcrux will revive you perfectly. But it's just a part of yourself, didn't you say?"

Harry began to see, with growing anxiety, just what Master Petri was implying. "But if every piece can do that, wouldn't it make sense to make dozens, no, hundreds of them? As many as possible?" Harry stopped as he realised that he was talking about committing hundreds of unspeakable acts. He swallowed thickly, horrified at himself.

"Did it occur to you at all that, if you are a soul, that breaking yourself into pieces could be the same as dying?" Master Petri asked, almost conversationally.

For a moment, Harry was scared by that idea, which he indeed had not at all considered, before he realised something incontrovertible.

"I'm not dead," he pointed out. It could be that he was actually dead but only didn't realise it, but then what would be the point of the concept, "dead?" He didn't feel dead, at any rate.

Master Petri smiled patronizingly at him. "No, you aren't dead," he agreed, providing no help whatsoever.

Harry stared at him for awhile, realised that it was a pointless action, and then avoided looking directly at Master Petri, casting his gaze all around the room as if the answers would lie somewhere in the furnishings.

"I don't understand," he said at length, when it became clear that Master Petri wasn't about to offer any other information. It barely even made Harry feel stupid to admit to his confusion – he honestly felt like he had twisted his mind into a knot and got nowhere.

In response, Master Petri reached into his pocket, took out Harry's horcrux, and flung it at him. With some kind of twitch reflex Harry's hand shot out and caught it, all without his conscious direction. He glanced back and forth between the horcrux and Master Petri with trepidation.

Fortunately, Master Petri began to speak, and fortunately in English: "I'm not a master of necromancy," he said, successfully confusing Harry even further. "I am also not a master of transfiguration, though my conjuration is very good. I am just a charms master with the specialty in enchantment."

Harry thought he was beginning to understand what Master Petri was trying to say in the immediate sense, but still could not tell where it was going. Enchantment, conjuration, and necromancy; these were the fields that comprised the Other, though the name "necromancy" seemed to be the popular term to cover all three, when the first two were used in conjunction with the last. From what Harry knew about the fields of magic, they were three wildly different subjects that had somehow come together in one art. While not rare, it was also not the norm for a wizard to even master a single kind of magic in his lifetime – rather, it was more practical for most people to be average at most-everything useful, fairly skilled in the spells they regularly used in their line of work, and completely ignorant of more esoteric and arcane knowledge. The time and dedication it took to become good enough at a single thing that one could be called a "master" was just not worth it for the less academically minded.

Now that he thought about it, it would have been very strange if Master Petri had actually been master in three very disparate subjects. But why bring it up now?

"A horcrux is conjuration, you said, sir," Harry mumbled uncomfortably. The word itself, "horcrux," felt almost wrong to say, like something vile and forbidden. Well, he supposed that was exactly what it was. He tried to feel properly disgusted and only managed to intensify that funny, ill feeling that had been hounding him since the ritual, which was not quite the same, but still a bad feeling of some kind, he supposed.

"Yes, and very delicate. A perfect horcrux requires absolute mastery," Master Petri said, a very meaningful tone creeping into his voice.

Harry was struck by the near derision more than the words themselves, though their meaning quickly filtered into his understanding. He felt anger burning inside him, and was momentarily surprised at the sensation, the only "hot" emotion he had felt since the ritual. His fists clenched, and he opened his mouth to say something, but then the feeling of the cold, sharp edges of his horcrux digging into his hand distracted him. What complaint could he even make? If Master Petri, an experienced wizard who was a master at least in one field, could not manage a perfect ritual, then who else could, who would be willing to do it on Harry's behalf? The obvious solution would be to not have made a horcrux at all, but with Master Petri allowed to dictate Harry's actions in the name of education, that wasn't an option at all.

Still, he could not help the gnawing worry that suddenly consumed him, or stop the words from coming – "It worked, though, didn't it? It works?" he asked, almost desperately. Everything he'd done had to be for something.

"It _works_ ," Master Petri said, sounding a little derisive. Harry hunched inward, unsure whether to feel embarrassed or reassured, or even embarrassed at his own relief.

Master Petri seemed then to lose his remaining patience. He gave a loud sigh, set the vial of blood on the table behind him, took out his wand, and gave it a light flick, conjuring a looking glass out of thin air.

"Look at this," he ordered. Harry looked, and saw himself, small, gaunt, and pale, staring back at him with indifference.

Master Petri dropped the mirror on the ground. It clattered and bounced pathetically. Giving an irritated snort, he raised his foot and stomped on it. The glass crunched under his boot. Harry winced and flinched, his mind reflexively flashing to that stupid saying about seven years of bad luck that he had probably heard from Dudley once. It wasn't like his luck could get much worse, anyway. Then he remembered that the bad luck was for Master Petri, not him.

Then he remembered that it was a dumb superstition, and he wondered why he was even still thinking about it.

"Look at it now," Master Petri said, pulling Harry out of his strange train of thought. Harry followed Master Petri's gaze down to the shards of glass. A dozen random bits of him were arrayed on the floor, but still it didn't take much effort to piece together what the whole would look like.

Harry wondered if this was what his soul looked like now. Then he remembered what Master Petri had said – was trying to say – about souls not existing, and furthermore, figured that even if they did exist, they would certainly be impossible to _see_.

With a minuscule, almost lazy twitch of his wand, Master Petri levitated one of the pieces so that it hovered at Harry's eye-level. He saw half his face there, cut off by the jagged edge of the shard.

"Is this a good mirror?" Master Petri asked.

Harry wondered if it was a trick question. A quick glance at the impatient glare on the master's face made him decide to just answer it, anyway. "I think it is," he said, sounding more confident than he felt. He could see himself clearly, and if he stepped back far enough he could see more of himself too.

A dismissive circular movement of the wand, and all the shards floated up and fitted together, though they did not join back up into once piece, as they would have if a _reparo_ spell had been cast.

"Is this a good mirror?" Master Petri asked again.

"Uh, sort of," Harry mumbled, really not certain. At his teacher's unimpressed look, he finally decided, "No, not really. I mean, I can see myself, but it's not really a great reflection with lines in it and ... things." He decided to stop talking.

The pieces welded themselves together seamlessly.

"And this?" Master Petri questioned, obviously rhetorically.

"Yes," Harry said anyway.

"This is your 'soul,'" Master Petri, his entire posture screaming disdain. "I can't break this with my bare hands just by bending," he said, not bothering to demonstrate an attempt.

He dropped the mirror again, throwing it with some force. It cracked against the ground.

"An unspeakable act," he said, and bent down to pick it up. A piece fell off. He took that instead. Then, to Harry's surprise, he cast a duplication charm, and an exact copy of the broken piece appeared, floating at his wand tip.

"Your horcrux," he declared, sending the original piece – or was it the duplicate? – back to its place on the cracked mirror.

Taking a step forward, he stamped his foot on the mirror again, the crunching sound eliciting a reflexive shudder from Harry.

"Your death."

But the somehow gruesome analogy did not end there, or proceed with any predictability. Master Petri held out the shard of mirror, the "horcrux," and tapped it with his wand. It grew large, until it was about the same size as the destroyed mirror had been before.

"Your resurrection," he pronounced with some irony, and then, almost as an afterthought, vanished the pile of shattered glass on the ground with a flick of his wand.

Slowly, Harry felt the horrible realization begin to sink in. He looked at the place the shards had been, up to the big, jagged piece of mirror, and then down to the real horcrux in his hand.

"It's not me, it's a copy of me, a _bad_ copy," he mumbled, still staring at the thing in his hand.

"Not _bad_ ," Master Petri corrected, affecting an offended tone. Harry realised a little belatedly that he was cracking a joke, sort of.

Harry tried to think how that meant that there were no souls, and was still, frustratingly, coming up short. “But what about dementors, what happens when …” he trailed off when he saw that Master Petri was fully prepared to show what happened.

He conjured another mirror  and flipped it over to show the grey backing. “What is a mirror without  its silvering?” With a precise movement of his wand, he sliced off a thin sheet, angl ing the remainder toward s Harry.

“It’s just glass,” he said, peering through the transparent surface.

“Yes. No more reflection, no more awareness of the self. Also, obliviate,” said Master Petri, and for a moment Harry was petrified that a spell was going to come at him or something, but then he realised that Master Petri was only saying the incantation without casting—there was a noticeable difference of tone Now he cast another silent spell, so that the piece of glass vanished.

He levitated the other piece to the forefront. “This, however, is still a mirror, though it has lost almost everything it once was. Your reflection in it is still intact. But this thing that people call a soul, it is not so well-defined as even a reflection.”

Master Petri vanished everything and conjured something new. It was a bowl. He set it on the ground, and a flick of his wand sent water spouting neatly from the end, splashing in the bowl and filling it quickly.

“If you want to call it a soul, you can. It is only a word. But it’s like that.” He made some stirring motions with his wand, and the water swirled, as if there were an invisible spoon disturbing it.

Harry stared wordlessly at his churning, twisted reflection.


	8. Diviner

"Now you have learned something," Master Petri said a little scathingly, and turned away to snatch the vial of Lucius Malfoy's blood from the table. "So."

It became clear he was not going to say anything else as he busied with the preparations of whatever they were going to do – conjure up Lucius Malfoy's father, apparently. Harry watched with some distraction as Master Petri removed a heavily carved stone basin from a cabinet underneath the worktable and filled it with water from his wand, like he had with the "soul" bowl. It was difficult for Harry to stop thinking about what he had just learned.

He looked down and realised that his horcrux was still in his hand. He wondered with a start of horror whether it was conscious, whether it was all trapped in there, without a body, without anything. He tried to imagine it and it was so awful, so unthinkable, that he couldn't. His thoughts shied away instinctively from that abyss.

"This is the 'Denkarium,'" Master Petri said suddenly, stepping aside to let Harry see what was going on. Harry shook his head a little to try to focus and rid himself of the deep doubt that seemed to have sprung up everywhere around him. "In English, a 'pensieve.' Do you remember what the pensieve is?"

Harry snapped to attention, frowning as he struggled furiously to think through what he had learned so far. The way Master Petri had asked instead of demanded made it sound like it was not something that he was certain Harry would know, which made Harry feel a little better, but beyond seeing that it was clearly an enchanted object, he had no inkling.

Finally, he shook his head, "No sir." Master Petri waved his wand, but no curse came out. Instead, something big and black appeared alarmingly in Harry's peripheral vision and he only barely turned around in time to catch a giant book to his chest, his arms snapping up reflexively to hug it to himself as he pitched backwards dangerously. His horcrux dropped to the floor with a ringing clatter that sent an unwelcome tremble of fear lancing through him.

Regaining his balance, he tried to look at his book and pick up his horcrux at the same time, but Master Petri routed his latter intention by bending down to take the small black stone himself. He put it in his pocket again without a word. Harry bit his lip but turned reluctantly to the book.

He saw the familiar title, _The Complete Compendium of Charms_ , but it was a different copy from the one Master Petri usually gave Harry to use. Even though the title was still in English, it looked like the contents were in German; Harry supposed a translation of the title would probably not have been so nicely alliterative. Harry wasn't exactly sure what "compendium" even meant, but the general idea was pretty obvious.

"Search for the liquid thoughts charm," Master Petri said, turning back to his work.

Curious to know what Master Petri was doing despite himself, Harry quickly sat down with the book and turned it to the first blank page. He pulled out his wand, still a little strange and unwieldy in his hand, and tapped it against the page, saying the name of the charm clearly. It made him feel a little self-conscious to break the silence, but Master Petri did not react.

The book's enchantments activated it and Harry quickly pulled back as the pages started flipping rapidly on their own until they settled down on page two thousand and fifty-four. Featured prominently on the page was a big illustration of a carved bowl, just like the one Master Petri had out right now. In the drawing, a rough human figure stood over the bowl, put its wand to its temple, and extracted a string of something silvery, which then dropped into the bowl. The cursive notes next to the title of the spell told him that the wand motion was a tap-and-flick-directed process, which meant that it started by tapping something – one's head, presumably – and ended with a flick.

Unfortunately, Harry quickly found out that it was a lot harder to read in German than in English, and that, though the purpose of the liquid thoughts charm was clear, he barely understood anything of what the "Denkarium," or pensieve, actually did. It was obvious enough just by the picture that the charm somehow extracted thoughts from a person and let them be put in a container, and that the pensieve was that container, but Harry didn't think Master Petri would have given him the book instead of a verbal explanation if that was all. A few scans over the page to try to find something comprehensible eventually also let Harry know that it wasn't just any thoughts, but memories in particular, but that still did not seem like the point.

Glancing up at Master Petri, he was just in time to see the man upend the vial of Lucius Malfoy's blood into the pensieve. Harry blinked and looked back to the book, trying in vain to find any mention of blood. He somehow had the feeling that this was not one of the normal uses of a pensieve, even without being able to read the entry in detail.

Harry watched Master Petri for a few more moments as he twirled his wand above the basin as if he were stirring the contents. A silvery mist seemed to rise from the pensieve, cascading over the edges at a languid tumble before dissipating.

To Harry's surprise, Master Petri put his wand away, opened up one of the top drawers under the worktable, and took out a bit of parchment and a quill.

"This is definitely the hardest part of a conjuration," Master Petri said, not turning around, "and it is not really magic."

Harry put the book down and stood up so he could see what Master Petri was writing. It looked to him like random letters accompanied by squiggly arrows.

Fortunately, Master Petri elaborated without prompting, tapping the quill feather to indicate the first thing he had written, a "V" with an arrow pointing to the right. Unfortunately, he spoke in German, and Harry was still only half competent at understanding the language.

"The first thing is to –" Master Petri said several words that Harry didn't understand, "– of the body of Abraxas Malfoy. I must make an enchantment for it, using the most accurate methods according to current research. Do you know the next thing after –" he said the word again, and Harry froze, mind working furiously.

This was Lucius Malfoy's blood, so Harry guessed that it was some kind of transfiguration Master Petri was talking about, in order to make it into Abraxas Malfoy's blood. But Master Petri had said something about "perfectness" or "accuracy," so Harry assumed that the process wouldn't work exactly, which made sense. What to do once they had something similar to Abraxas Malfoy's blood?

He took a wild guess. "Uh, use the liquid thoughts charm?" Harry had no idea if it even worked for bits of people instead of whole people.

Master Petri snorted, but he did not look annoyed, as if Harry had something completely idiotic, which was a good sign.

"The impressions charm. It's similar," said Master Petri, taking out his wand and flicking it at the book on the floor. Harry glanced down to see that a paragraph on the same page had been highlighted in a soft blue glow. Harry was disheartened to see that he understood only about a third of the information there. It had something to do with pulling impressions out of an object. He guessed that they would work the same way as memories, though probably not as good.

Master Petri had gone back to writing the letters and arrows on the parchment, which Harry gathered were some kind of shorthand for the spells in the enchantment.

It quickly became boring to watch the man work, so Harry sat back down and tried to understand more of the entry on the liquid thoughts charm. He wished he could use the dictionary spell, which would let him translate individual words, but he couldn't cast it silently and didn't dare whisper it in case it disturbed Master Petri. It was just an access spell, which meant that it was barely magic, and just told him information that was kept at some other place and had been connected to the spell. Harry knew a couple of access spells, like the dictionary spell and the time-telling spell.

After an indeterminate amount of time, during which Harry had almost fallen asleep, Master Petri's scribbling stopped, and he took out his wand again. Harry noticed the movement and quickly got up to watch. Hearing him, Master Petri turned a little and beckoned him to move closer.

"We need a little of your blood, and then all the spells must be cast very quickly," he said. Harry baulked a little at the mention of his blood, but when Master Petri reached out for his hand, Harry let him take it.

"Prepare yourself. Remember to ask about the Dark Lord," Master Petri said, before raising his wand. He did not cut Harry or anything, surprisingly, but just tapped the underside of his arm and somehow managed to draw out what looked like a wiggling red strand on the end of his wand. Harry barely felt anything other than a weird warmth around where the wand had touched him. He nodded absently, watching the movement of the blood. The strand curled up until it was a levitating globule, and Master Petri directed it to the pensieve.

Instead of dropping the blood inside, he made it unravel and spread around the carvings in the outside surface. Belatedly, Harry realised that the carvings were actually made up of letters and arrows. He glanced back over to the parchment and saw that there were now messy words scribbled over the array of letters and arrows, which were just like a flattened version of the carvings on the pensieve.

Then Master Petri grabbed the parchment, looked it over, and began casting, and Harry had to admit that it was one of the most impressive things he had seen yet. The wand moved almost too quickly for him to see, and Master Petri was muttering continuously under his breath, yet without any sense of franticness or anxiety. Flashes of light, mostly white and blue, lit up the pensieve and its contents, and after about a solid minute of unbroken spellwork, all of the carvings began glowing silver.

Harry was so entranced by the process that he did not expect it at all when Master Petri lowered his wand, raised his hand, and shoved Harry's face into the bowl. Yelping as he lost his balance, Harry shut his eyes and tried to hold his breath, but instead of being splashed by a bloody slop or hitting his nose on the bottom of the basin, he suddenly felt much lighter and the ground disappeared underneath him.

More importantly, he felt like he was falling very quickly. Panicked, he opened his eyes and saw only blackness around him for a moment, before it was then all over and he hit the ground with surprising gentleness. Or rather, somehow the ground hit him, appearing out of nowhere along with a weird, misty fog.

After a taking a few deep breaths to reorient himself, Harry noticed that the table he was standing in front of was quite familiar, if tinted in a funny shade of grey. He was still in Master Petri's workshop, but all of the clutter on the worktables was missing, and there was mist and grey pallor everywhere. Looking down at himself, Harry saw that even his own skin was not its usual pale pink, but a corpse-like, unyielding grey.

A little disturbed already, he nearly jumped out of his skin when a shadow moved beside him, and whirled around, expecting to see Master Petri, but finding Lucius Malfoy there instead.

No. It wasn't Lucius Malfoy. This man was older and had a moustache. He wasn't as thin, either, and he was wearing distastefully frilly robes. Harry remembered that they were conjuring Abraxas Malfoy, so this obviously had to be him. Lucius Malfoy's father.

"Er, hello Mr Malfoy," Harry said, feeling a little stupid even as the greeting came out of his mouth.

Abraxas Malfoy said nothing, but it wasn't the sort of nothing that happened because of total disdain, or purposeful silence. Rather, it looked like Abraxas Malfoy hadn't heard him at all. Harry bit his lip, and decided that there wasn't a reason to be too polite. The man was dead, after all.

"We're looking for something about Lord, er," Harry could not believe that he had forgotten the name. He thought furiously for a few moments before giving it up, and saying, "the Dark Lord?"

Somewhat to his surprise, something happened, but that something was not Abraxas Malfoy replying to him. Instead, silver mist seemed to engulf them completely, drawing a startled yell from Harry as the ground vanished underneath him again. He could still see Abraxas Malfoy standing there, frozen, a statue in the mist.

Then the mist began to clear, and Harry noticed that the ground had returned without his noticing somehow. Suddenly, Abraxas Malfoy began to move. He had changed somehow, and Harry tried to figure out what it was, but it was impossible. His clothing seemed to shift before Harry's eyes – even Malfoy's face wouldn't settle down properly, and yet Harry still felt like he was looking at a person, nothing strange.

There were people surrounding him, and Harry stumbled back, trying to get away from the horrible, skull-masked figures. None of them reacted to him, though, and he realized they couldn't see him, somehow, the same way Malfoy apparently couldn't see him. When he looked back, he saw Malfoy clad in the same robes as them, solid black, the frills from before gone. He was wearing the mask as well, but that flowing, silvery hair was unmistakable.

" _Crucio_ ," said Abraxas Malfoy, and Harry nearly tripped over himself as the bright flash of that awful spell came out of the man's wand. Someone began screaming. Harry whirled around and saw the target of the spell, a woman, he thought, writhing around in agony. It was impossible to get a clear sight of her face or even her height or anything, really. Still he knew somehow that it was a woman who was getting tortured.

He looked away, not wanting to watch it go on, and focused on Malfoy instead. The skull mask was clear on his face, not wavering like some of the other things.

A funny sound began resonating through the clearing in the fog, overpowering the screams until Harry could recognise it for what it was – laughter. The skull-masked people were laughing. Someone else stepped forward and took a shot at the woman, the colour of the spell warped into the same dull greyscale of the rest of the world, and as if it were a signal, the others stepped forward too, wands raised.

Harry couldn't watch. He felt… well, he didn't feel ill, but he felt like he needed to feel ill. He just felt so strange, and he knew he did not want to watch the woman get tortured. He couldn't block out the screaming, but that wasn't as bad, somehow.

Suddenly, a cold, high voice hissed, "Enough," and the sound cut off abruptly, the screaming, the laughter, the roar of spellfire. Harry whirled around and his eyes locked on the new figure, clad all in black, composed and terribly imposing.

The silver mist began creeping forward again, swirling all about. "No!" Harry called out almost unconsciously, reaching out. The mist kept moving, but the Dark Lord – because this person had to be none other than the Dark Lord – stayed where he was, eyes dispassionate. Harry turned a little, not wanting to let the figure of the Dark Lord out of his sight, to check that Abraxas Malfoy was still there. He was, and he was still wearing the skull mask and the black robes.

The scene finished shifting, and Harry saw that they were alone now, Malfoy and the Dark Lord, and Malfoy had taken off his mask.

"Abraxas," said the Dark Lord coolly. Harry shuddered. He couldn't imagine being addressed by that voice. It was terrifying. It was at least ten times worse than the worst glare Master Petri had ever directed at him, and the Dark Lord didn't even look _angry_ , he just looked _bored_.

Abraxas Malfoy was down on one knee, head bowed, a curtain of long silver hair masking his face, but Harry got the distinct sense that he was younger than before. "My Lord," he said. He might have been trembling a little, or maybe it was just the same wavering that seemed to plague this entire place, whatever it was.

The Dark Lord took something out of his robes, something small and rectangular, which Harry couldn't get a good look at because it was wavering like most everything else, and presented it to Malfoy. Still, Harry immediately got a powerful sense that it was extremely valuable, and that it had to be protected at all costs. The feeling evaporated somewhat a moment later, but he could still remember the weird strength of that conviction.

The Dark Lord was speaking again, Abraxas too, but for some reason Harry couldn't hear what they were saying. It was like the fog had muffled everything up, even though he could still see both figures perfectly.

Then that changed too, and the mist swallowed everything again, except for Malfoy, and this time it stayed that way, they were still in the mist.

"Where is the Dark Lord?" Harry asked aloud, his voice surprisingly croaky. He cleared his throat, but his question seemed to have done the trick, because the silver mist shifted again, and he was watching yet another scene, now with the skull-masked people again, whom Harry supposed were the Dark Lord's followers, given how they bowed and scraped.

He couldn't hear anything again, and it was really hard to get a grasp on all the shaky images, but it seemed like the Dark Lord was giving a speech to a small group of followers, gesticulating wildly. He looked inhuman, far stranger than he had in the other scene. It only made him more frightening.

Suddenly, Harry's eyes fixed on a short, shaking figure right next to Malfoy, really shaking, not just that wavering. Harry could see the man fine: he wasn't wearing a mask, he had mousy hair, a plump face, wide eyes, and his lips were parted enough to show rather large front teeth. He reminded Harry distinctly of a rat.

A lot of impressions suddenly bombarded Harry, he knew that this scene was later, far later than the ones he saw before, like he could feel Malfoy's age weighing down on him. He felt nervous anticipation well up inside him, a really foreign sensation.

He could hear.

"Wormtail, tell them the secret," said the Dark Lord. His voice wasn't commanding now, but almost playful. Harry shuddered again.

And Wormtail, obviously the rat-like man, shook and stuttered, but he spoke, and what he said was, "Li-Lily and, and James P-Potter live at, live, live at…" but Harry had stopped paying attention to the rest of the words, or maybe the words hadn't even come out right; Harry wasn't sure, but it didn't matter, because he knew those names. Those were the names of his _parents_.

At least, Lily was his mother's name, and Harry's name was Harry James Potter, and it was just too much of a coincidence.

Then the scene shifted again, and again Harry felt the age, felt how Abraxas Malfoy was older. They were in some kind of cramped room, probably underground, given the torchlight and the stairs leading upward. Malfoy was looking at something _important_ , the importance rushed through Harry with great urgency, leaving his heart pounding and his breathing heavy. But what was it? Harry tried to catch a glimpse but the image kept wavering, the silvery mist encroached on him on all sides. It was small, he saw a corner – was it a book?

The mist enveloped them, and Abraxas Malfoy was standing there again, empty handed, and then the mist swirled away again and they were in the same place, except this time Harry's eyes fixed on the near copy of Abraxas Malfoy there, just much younger – his son, Lucius Malfoy.

Abraxas was saying something, but it was impossible to tell what. He was giving Lucius something _important. Protect it. The Dark Lord's._

Harry struggled to see but it was no use, the mist was filling everything up again and Harry's stomach lurched as he suddenly fell, arms flailing in the impenetrable darkness.

With a gasp, Harry resurfaced, swaying backwards as he found himself in the colourful, rich detail of reality, his face felt wet, and he touched it gingerly, thankful to find that it was only sweat that coated his brow, nothing else. He eyed the pensieve and its lightly gleaming silver contents warily.

"Well, how was it?" Master Petri asked a little impatiently.

Harry took a few deep breaths to try to settle himself. "Unexpected," he said, because it was true. "So," he started, unsure how he could even begin to explain the things he had just seen. They only half made any sense to him, and he couldn't stop thinking about Lily and James Potter. His parents must have been a witch and wizard, then. There was no other good explanation. Harry didn't know if that made him feel better or worse.

"I will take a look at what you recovered," Master Petri said, surprising Harry as he turned to the pensieve and leaned over, dipping his face into the silvery liquid. Harry wasn't sure if he had expected Master Petri to just suddenly disappear, but for all intents and purposes it looked as if the man had just put his face into a bowl and decided not to take it back out. It looked too strange, so Harry turned away.

He occupied himself with the charms book again, this time taking advantage of the fact that Master Petri clearly couldn't hear him. The dictionary spell was a life-saver.

It turned out that the experience he had had in the pensieve was pretty normal, in terms of the falling sensation and the switch from scene to scene. The wavering he had seen was the uncertainty in the memory, and Harry gathered that there had been quite a lot of uncertainty, in this case, since it wasn't real memories he had seen, but something Master Petri had somehow conjured up. Harry still was not sure why he had had to go first, but he supposed Master Petri would explain that after he resurfaced.

As Harry had expected, the charms book made no mention of anything resembling whatever Master Petri had done. It did talk about the impression charm that he had mentioned, which allowed one to glean impressions from an object placed inside the pensieve, in order to reconstruct where the object had been. The book warned that this was a kind of divination, and not always accurate.

Harry supposed that whatever it is he and Master Petri had just done with Abraxas Malfoy was also divination – that was what necromancy was. He wondered why it even made a difference that Malfoy was dead. Would the process not have worked just as well on a live person?

At that point, Master Petri suddenly stood up, shaking his head and muttering under his breath. Harry winced, wondering if he had somehow messed things up; Master Petri looked angry.

"He's clearly not dead," Master Petri said.

"Malfoy?" Harry asked, curiosity overcoming his caution. Master Petri shook his head.

"The Dark Lord," he answered. Harry felt a shiver go down his spine. Still, he did not understand.

"How do you know that?"

"Divination on the dead is necromancy. Divination on the living is, well, simple divination. In English they call it 'scrying.' There is a noticeable difference," Master Petri said dryly. "Good work, anyway."

Harry blinked, surprised at the compliment, but still rather bewildered. "Thank you, sir, but I'm not fully sure what I did."

"You reconstructed some important memories about the Dark Lord," Master Petri explained. Harry was relieved to recognise that word, "reconstruct," now, after having learned it from the dictionary spell while reading the charms book. Harry nodded, only half understanding how he had managed that.

"Not bad for an apprentice," Master Petri continued. "Perhaps you have some talent."

Harry nodded again, feeling a little awkward. He did not know what to do with praise from Master Petri. It seemed somehow incorrect.

"Lucius Malfoy is also a liar," Master Petri added casually. Harry blinked.

"What?" he asked, forgetting to restrain himself. Still, Master Petri seemed glad to share this business.

"We could have saved the effort of reconstructing his father's blood. We saw that Lucius Malfoy himself was obviously a Death Eater, with more than enough relation to Lord Voldemort for scrying," he explained.

"Death Eater?" Harry repeated. Then it was obvious, "The people with the skulls …" he trailed off a little awkwardly, realising that he had no idea how to say "mask" or "follower" in German. Master Petri nodded, apparently not noticing any problem with that description.

After a few moments of silence, something else occurred to Harry. "Is it finished then?" he asked. "Is that all he wanted you to do?" It seemed a little too easy for how much money Malfoy had offered. It also had not been remotely dangerous.

Master Petri shook his head. "Hardly," he replied. "But I do not know what we should do. Mister Malfoy wanted us to summon the Dark Lord's spirit and bind it, perhaps to ask for its secrets. But the Dark Lord still lives. _Ich will den Dunklen Lord sicherlich nicht herausfordern._ "

Harry did not understand the last word Master Petri said, but got the idea that Master Petri did not want to find a living dark lord, assuming a dark lord really was the ultra-dark wizard Harry had assumed it was.

"Can't you just tell him that?" Harry asked, seeing that Master Petri looked open to suggestions.

"Will he pay me?" Master Petri asked in return. Harry frowned and supposed he wasn't sure, and of course that was what was preoccupying Master Petri.

"What happened to the Dark Lord then, if he isn't dead?" Harry brought up, because it was obvious that people, or at least Lucius Malfoy, had _thought_ that he was dead.

"He probably almost died," Master Petri said a little distractedly, "Or maybe he seemed to die but did not. Maybe he had a horcrux. Many prominent dark wizards do."

Something important. Harry's eyes widened.

"But sir, what about that object, that valuable object …" he trailed off, because it was clear that Master Petri had come to the same conclusion as him, at the same time.

"But if so, Lucius Malfoy obviously has it. Unless he doesn't know?" Master Petri was talking to himself now, and though Harry had felt excited, caught up in the moment, he remembered that it didn't really have anything to do with him.

Or did it? Lily and James Potter. What did they have to do with the Dark Lord? Had they been his followers? Harry was not sure, but it did not seem like it, the way that rat-like man had said their names. Had they really died in a car crash? He was beginning to wonder.

"It can't be a horcrux," Master Petri concluded, drawing Harry's attention back to the original conundrum, "the Dark Lord would have already possessed Lucius Malfoy right away. That's the whole point."

"What is it then?" Harry asked, a little disappointed, despite himself.

"Maybe important notes. It was a kind of book, wasn't it?" Master Petri suggested dismissively, clearly already losing interest in the object.

Harry decided not to bring up any more theories, in case Master Petri got annoyed. Actually, he didn't have any more theories, anyway.

"I will think about it. Go and make dinner," Master Petri ordered, rather suddenly. Harry decided it would be for the best to leave him alone, and headed for the trap door that would take him out of the attic workshop and back into the small flat.

It was dark, and Harry almost tripped over a chair as he tried to make his way to the kitchen. He wished he could cast the lighting charm already, but Master Petri's warning of crippling his potential by using a wand too much, too early, still scared him enough that he was not about to attempt it.

When he made it to the little kitchen area, he realised that it would be really stupid to try to make food in the dark. Trying to think of some way to fix the situation without bothering Master Petri, he remembered the house's other resident.

Knocking on the door underneath the sink, he waited. Nothing happened. Annoyed, he knocked again.

Finally, the cupboard door was thrown open and Harry had to lean away quickly in order not to get smashed in the face. Rosenkol's dark eyes gleamed at him.

"What do you want?" the elf demanded. Harry had recently become accustomed enough to German to understand how much the elf was disrespecting him by addressing him informally. He supposed it didn't matter, though.

"Could you please light the candles?" he asked, trying to be as nice as possible. The elf scowled at him, but reached out with long, spindly fingers and snapped once. The entire flat was bathed in the warm, lambent glow of firelight. "Thanks," Harry said.

In response, Rosenkol slammed the cupboard door. Harry sighed and turned to the food chest to get to work. It was basically a wizard version of a refrigerator, but instead of being cold, it was enchanted so that whatever was put inside it was in "stasis," which made it not spoil.

The only thing in there was a few heads of cabbage, which Harry knew not to touch because they were Rosenkol's cabbage ration, some carrots, potatoes, and a jug of milk.

Lovely. There was more house elf food than human food in the box.

He took out the vegetables, washed them, peeled them, and then put them on the cutting board with the enchanted knife, which promptly began chopping them to bits. If there was one thing about magic that Harry appreciated, it was the way it automated half the effort of making food.

Checking some other cupboards and cabinets and giving Rosenkol's nest wide berth, Harry managed to find the thin noodles he had misplaced some weeks ago and a tin of flat, square biscuits that didn't look particularly appetising.

By the time Master Petri appeared downstairs, Harry had made up a passable noodle soup. Aunt Petunia probably would have spit it out and thrown it in the rubbish bin, but Master Petri ate it without comment, looking rather far away. He even authorised Harry to use a galleon when Harry casually brought up the lack of food in the chest.

Harry could only conclude that the man must have thought of something.


	9. Commodity

All day Master Petri had been paying an unwarranted amount of notice to Harry. It wasn't attention, but more like sidelong awareness, as if he were keeping Harry purposefully in his peripheral vision even while ostensibly occupied with some other task.

It was Monday, so the shop was bustling with activity after the day of silence observed by practically every shop in Germany. Master Petri liked to complain that the custom had the most horrendously muggle origins and that it was bad for business, but on this matter he was really all talk: come Sunday he locked up like everybody else, certainly not eager to stand out in any way.

Master Petri was minding the counter today, and had Harry by the door handing out samples of their newest product, Charm Dust, to curious customers. A sprinkle of Charm Dust in one's hair was supposed to increase charisma and beauty, but it was undetectable by the usual revealing spells targeting such enhancements. Harry wasn't completely sure that the bright pink crystals actually did anything magical at all, but he kept a smile plastered on his face and offered a pinch to everyone who walked by.

There was a lull in the flow of customers entering the shop, and Harry's eyes absently followed the model snitch that was flitting agitatedly around the animated porcelain horse in the window display. He fancied that he could feel the keen gaze of Master Petri boring into his back, but of course when he turned around to look the man was busy selling what looked like a thin metal spring to a dark-haired witch, and didn't seem to be paying Harry any mind at all.

Harry narrowed his eyes and turned away again. The snitch was gone now. The uneasy feeling of being watched returned. Resolutely, he kept his eyes fixed on a spot of chipped paint on the wall and tried to ignore the urge to look around again. Looking at Master Petri wasn't going to answer any of his questions about why the man was watching him.

Suddenly, there was a whooshing sound, and Harry's gaze jerked toward the fireplace, which had flared the bright green of floo travel. Tongues of flame danced wickedly in the tall grate, grasping about like fingers, but no figure or face appeared, and after a few moments they died down back into a tame orange flicker.

Glancing at Master Petri, Harry saw that he had a somewhat worried but not surprised expression on his face, and had moved to leave his place behind the counter. Harry watched as he came up to the fireplace and waved his hand impatiently.

Obligingly, Harry got up from his sample table and slid behind the counter, pulling the step stool forward so he could stand at a comfortable level above the cash box and at eye level with customers. In the few seconds it had taken for them to switch, a small queue of witches and wizards had already collected.

" _Servus_ ," Harry greeted the first with a nod. The wizard returned the greeting and put a wooden box with a crank onto the counter. Harry looked at it for a nervous moment of uncertainty, trying to figure out which box-shaped object this one was, before he remembered the cheat-sheet in the sliding panel underneath the counter and surreptitiously tapped his wand to the enchanted paper, concentrating on the item he wanted. It was a lullaby-singing chest.

"Five galleons and twelve sickles," he said. The man handed over the money and Harry dropped it into the deceptively cute little opening on the cash box, which briefly showed some teeth as it "ate" the coins. It then gave a low burp. "Have a nice day," Harry told the departing wizard.

He finished selling a remembrall and an astronomical wristwatch to an elderly witch, an animated figurine of a dragon to a harried-looking wizard with a bouncing little boy at his side, and several rolls of permanent sticking and spello-tape to a lanky teenaged girl, before the fireplace flared green again and Master Petri stepped out.

The first thing Harry noticed was that he seemed significantly more on edge and stressed than he had been before.

The second was that he was wearing the horrible, cold face that he always had when somebody or something was taking money away from him, like he was trying not to be angry and failing on every account.

He stood there, stiffly, half-hovering at the counter, as Harry dealt with the next three customers. As soon as the queue disappeared Master Petri was at Harry's side, pressing some small object into his hand.

Harry looked down and saw a very tiny vial, of the familiar type that Master Petri usually used to hold blood and keep it fresh. It was filled, though really there wasn't room for more than an thimbleful of liquid.

"Lucius Malfoy's; don't lose it," Master Petri said extraordinarily quietly, so that only the sight of his mouth moving convinced Harry that he had spoken at all.

"What?" Harry managed to reply a little stupidly. Master Petri glared at him and made a shushing motion. Harry closed his mouth and put the little vial of blood into the deep recesses of his pocket.

"Go to your closet. Don't trust Malfoy," Master Petri said, continuing to be unbelievably cryptic. Unwilling to stoke his teacher's ire at the moment, Harry did as he was told, heading toward the floo.

When he made it through the dizzying green flames and was spat out into the workroom, everything suddenly began to make simultaneously more and less sense.

Lucius Malfoy was standing in the middle of the room, leaning elegantly on his silver, snake-head cane and lounging regally despite his surroundings. Harry stood flabbergasted for a moment as he tried to put everything together. Why had Master Petri sent him here to be alone with Lucius Malfoy? Why had he given Harry the blond wizard's blood?

Then Harry remembered that he was supposed to go to his closet, and not in fact chat with Lucius Malfoy, and awkwardly nodded to the man before heading for the trap door.

"Harry Potter," Lucius Malfoy said suddenly, his voice a smooth drawl. He sounded far too pleased for his own good, and Harry paused warily, trying to understand how he had any importance at all, such that Lucius Malfoy knew his name in the first place. Did apprentices come up often in business discussions? Somehow, Harry doubted it.

"Yes, Mr. Malfoy?" Harry answered cautiously.

"What is the Boy-Who-Lived doing here? Is this a scheme of Dumbledore's?" Lucius Malfoy murmured, and it was hard to tell whether he was even addressing Harry at all.

Harry figured he must be, if indirectly. Was today some special day where one talked in riddles, one whose announcement Harry had missed? "I don't understand what you're saying," Harry said honestly.

Lucius Malfoy's grey eyes glinted. "You are Harry Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived," he stated.

Harry tried to process this statement in any way he could. Of course he suddenly remembered the incident – well, it could not really be called an incident, but the moment – in the shop with Lucius Malfoy's son. Harry didn't remember the boy's name but he certainly remembered the funny reaction he had had to Harry's own name, and all the fantastical titles that had accompanied it. He still didn't understand any details, but he understood enough to know that it was something important.

How common was the name Harry Potter? Apparently not common enough.

Lucius Malfoy seemed to take Harry's extended silence as some kind of affirmation. Affirmation of what, Harry wasn't sure, but he felt distinctly tense and discomfited.

"Excuse me, but my master said to go to my, er, room, so I'm going to do that," he said a little awkwardly and breathily, and then tried to turn to leave, though he was reluctant to put his back to Lucius Malfoy.

Lucius Malfoy laughed a little, sophisticated-sounding laugh, though Harry couldn't see what was funny at all.

"Forget your… master," the blond wizard said slowly, "and tell me how this happened. It's criminal, you understand, for a lowlife like that to keep someone like you locked up and ignorant."

Harry found it distinctly weird to hear Master Petri referred to as a "lowlife," when despite himself he had grown some healthy respect for the man's magical skill, if nothing else. And even though what Lucius Malfoy was saying did sound technically right, something about it felt off to Harry, maybe something as nebulous as the cadence of the man's voice, but something nonetheless.

Maybe it was the use of words like "locked up" or "ignorant." Harry wasn't locked up, exactly. And he also wasn't ignorant, was he? The whole point of the apprenticeship was that he was learning things. And he _was_ learning things; that was something that was undeniable.

The fireplace flared with green flame, saving Harry from trying to figure out something to say. Master Petri emerged, spinning exactly into place without stumbling. He cast a glance over the room and his gaze lingered on Harry.

"You're still here," he commented.

Harry started. "Sorry sir, I'll just-"

"No, stay," Master Petri said, waving his hand dismissively. He turned to Lucius Malfoy. "You wanted renegotiation?"

Lucius Malfoy pursed his lips in a poised look of disapproval. " _You_ wanted renegotiation, I believe. I was told you would be adequate for the task, but perhaps my contacts were wrong."

"The Dark Lord is still alive," Master Petri said bluntly. Harry was surprised that he had given up that information without further prompting; he had been under the impression that Master Petri wanted to extract money from Lucius Malfoy somehow and that this was not the way to do it.

But Lucius Malfoy actually looked much thrown by this revelation, his previously perfect composure cracking visibly before he managed to regain himself.

"You are certain?" he demanded, and then he seemed to think better of the question, and asked instead, "How is that possible?"

Master Petri looked unimpressed. "It is my task to deal with the dead, and I know what they look like. It was your task to support the Dark Lord, and you should know what kind of wizard he is."

Harry thought the answer was a bit roundabout and confusing, but it seemed to hit Lucius Malfoy hard in several ways.

"I – you dare? You're accusing me of-" he stopped abruptly, as if uncertain what exactly it was that Master Petri was accusing him of after all. Finally, he managed, "I was placed under the imperius curse," though it sounded stilted.

Master Petri shook his head rather condescendingly.

"So you will not seek him out? He cannot be too far from here, in fact. The quality of scrying decreases much with distance."

Lucius Malfoy paled considerably, so that his already pasty complexion somehow managed to take on the colour of bleached parchment. He then seemed to regain some resolve.

"This is not what I came here for," he said, straightening a little. He opened his mouth again, clearly ready to state his actual purpose, but Master Petri cut him off.

"I am sure _he_ would be pleased to hear that," he said with a little smile. Lucius Malfoy grimaced.

"Don't threaten me. If he's alive, then why is he hiding? He must have been weakened, driven away," Malfoy said, turning to gaze meaningfully at Harry at that. Harry frowned in frustrated bewilderment.

"I am not threatening you," Master Petri replied calmly, "I am renegotiating."

Lucius Malfoy just looked at him for a long time, and Harry got the distinct impression that he was very annoyed, but also somehow unable to act at the moment.

"Very well then," he finally said, "to the point then. It has recently come to my attention that your apprentice seems a little young to be doing magic."

Master Petri narrowed his eyes. "This again? I thought you meant to do business!" he said accusingly, and rather rightfully, Harry thought. He was rather alarmed that the discussion suddenly seemed to be turning to him.

"He is of personal interest to me, you see, and I'm sure he cannot be very useful to you," Lucius Malfoy continued undeterred. Harry bristled at the clear insult, but knew that he was being summarily ignored at the moment. "I would like him to come with me, if that's agreeable to you. I will pay you the original sum we agreed upon for your information and your, ah, silence, of course, and an additional two thousand galleons as well, as compensation."

Harry stared at the man, trying not to gape. Was Malfoy basically offering to _buy_ him? He didn't know whether to be horribly indignant or flattered.

"I apologize, but that's out of the question. My apprentice is _very_ useful to me," Master Petri said after a beat, his accent coming into sudden clarity at the enunciated words. For a second, Harry almost felt heartwarmed that miserly Master Petri actually valued him more than a small fortune before he remembered one piece of important business advice, about what Master Petri called " _Antiselektion_ ," whatever that meant. It boiled down to, "refuse offers that are too good to be true." And if anybody was making a ridiculous offer right now, it was Lucius Malfoy.

Harry was probably worth a sickle to his master, realistically. Two thousand galleons just flat out made no sense, and Lucius Malfoy clearly knew something they didn't. He cheered up at the thought that the world had not gone topsy-turvy and Master Petri was still an utter bastard.

"Three thousand, then," Malfoy offered after a small pause. Harry had to press his lips together this time. He wasn't supposed to _raise_ after being rejected. Harry could practically feel the tension suddenly permeating the room. Master Petri looked distinctly less calm than he had before. As much as he liked seeing the man ruffled, however, Harry would rather it not be now, when the subject at hand regarded his fate, and especially not when Master Petri was being tempted with his only weakness, money.

"The boy has ten-thousand galleon value to me," Master Petri answered then, looking resolute.

 _What_.

That flat expression of bewilderment, no longer even a question, was the only thing that ran through Harry's mind for a few moments.

Harry didn't think that he had ever heard something so outrageous come out of Master Petri's mouth, and plenty of outrageous things indeed emerged daily. But despite himself, he could see the cleverness in the move. The huge amount was equivalent to "no," but prevented Malfoy from making further offers without either bankrupting himself or looking stupid.

Or perhaps not.

"That's your price then?" Malfoy pressed, looking victorious, probably rightly, "Very well."

Harry was now just outright flabbergasted, and clearly, so was Master Petri, because there was no conceivable riposte to what Malfoy had just done, really.

"There's paperwork do be done," Master Petri said finally. "It will take a week or two."

"Of course," Lucius Malfoy said graciously, nodding. "If you will excuse me, then, I will be going. Good day."

The blond man strode over to the fireplace and disappeared in a whirl of green flames. Suddenly, something occurred to Harry.

"How did he get up here at all?" he asked. Master Petri turned about, looking furious.

" _That_ is what you ask, after all this?" the man spat. Harry flinched, realising himself how stupid the question was. Master Petri answered him anyway, "I gave him access, after his original advance payment. A mistake, perhaps."

Harry quieted, watching Master Petri pace back and forth, clearly quite agitated. He stopped suddenly, hands clasped behind his back, and began muttering to himself rapidly in German.

"He would pay ten thousand galleons if he had to, but he doesn't have to. He must have ways. But why so much? How?" He turned to Harry and gave him a scrutinising once-over.

"Sir, he called me the Boy-Who-Lived, whatever that means," Harry brought up cautiously, figuring that that was the only special thing about him he could think of.

Master Petri abruptly froze, hands falling to his sides. "Harry Potter," he said. "Harry Potter, Harry Potter!"

Harry stared, uncertain whether to speak up.

"I'm an utter fool," Master Petri said to himself with a tone of wonder, reaching up and twisting his hair agitatedly. He then looked straight at Harry, scrutinizing him with dark, beady eyes.

"You yourself didn't know, did you? How could you not have known?" he demanded. Harry shook his head in bewilderment.

"Know what, sir?" he shook his head again, "About the Boy-Who-Lived thing? No. Was I supposed to know? What is it anyway?"

Master Petri seemed about as flabbergasted by the entire situation as Harry felt, though likely for somewhat different reasons. With a harsh twirl of his wand he summoned his chair and sat down heavily, looking older than Harry had ever seen him.

"Sit down," he said without much particular intonation. Harry obeyed, settling cross-legged on the ground. Another twirl of Master Petri's wand summoned a crisp, seamlessly-bound volume from a nearby bookshelf. _"The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts,"_ Harry saw on the spine, in English, as Master Petri opened the book. There was an enchantment symbol that Harry recognised in a corner of the front cover that indicated the book was a self-updating edition. Master Petri flipped through it manually for a few moments before he found what he was looking for, and began to read aloud.

"On the thirty-first of October, 1981, Lord Voldemort's reign of terror came to an abrupt and unexpected end: he was hit by his own rebounded killing curse. The exact circumstances of his death remain a topic of scholarly debate, as this particular form of malfunction of the killing curse was unprecedented at the time. The intended victim of the curse, a one-year-old Harry Potter, _Harry Potter_ ," he repeated Harry's name with ample frustration, before continuing, "was left unharmed but for a wound in the shape of a lightning bolt at the impact site. Understandably, this outcome was also a source of uproar for the academic community and the wizarding world at large, as no one had ever survived a direct hit from a properly-cast killing curse in recorded history.

"The mysterious and to-date unexplained nature of the event has led to popular use throughout the British magical community of the moniker, the "Boy-Who-Lived," to refer to surviving member of the Potter family. The Potters are today widely hailed as heroes for their hand in defeating one of the greatest and most terrible dark wizards in history."

A lot of questions and objections had sprung into Harry's mind while Master Petri read, but he had wisely kept his mouth shut. Now, however, they were jockeying for first position as it seemed he would have an opportunity to voice them.

Before he said anything else though, he needed to make sure he was understanding this correctly. It didn't help that he had once again forgotten the name of the Dark Lord.

"It's talking about the Dark Lord, like _that_ Dark Lord, right? The one who's still alive?" he asked.

Master Petri snapped the book shut, looking unimpressed, as Harry had expected he would. "Yes, _that_ Dark Lord. Lord Voldemort."

 _Voldemort_ , Harry thought to himself, trying hard to remember it this time. What a strange name.

"The point is that Lucius Malfoy wants you at any cost because you are famous in his country. Doubtless he'd love to use you. Or perhaps kill you. Anyhow, what I do not understand at all is how you ended up living like a mudblood with no idea of anything," Master Petri said, stopping there expectantly as if Harry was supposed to know the reason for his own ignorance.

"Well I was with my aunt and uncle," Harry offered. His aunt and uncle who were muggles, he realised then. That must imply that he was half-mudblood, or something like that. He wondered if that was bad.

Master Petri sneered. "They were muggles," he emphasised, as if that explained everything, "Why would anyone leave anything important with _muggles_ , especially a wizard's child? Madness!"

Harry supposed that Master Petri had a point. It was also clear that the Dursleys hadn't wanted him in the first place, so obviously their opinions hadn't mattered either.

Neither he nor Master Petri could provide an adequate explanation, and after a few moments of silent consideration Master Petri seemed to decide that it was unimportant.

"Lucius Malfoy is a liar and a cheat, and is certainly not coming back with ten thousand galleons," he declared with grim confidence. "No doubt he's calling the aurors as we speak."

Harry recalled that the aurors were like the wizarding police. Master Petri mentioned them often whenever he explained which things were allowed to go in the main shop and which were not.

"Couldn't he have just done that before?" Harry wondered aloud. Why had Lucius Malfoy gone through the whole farce of trying to pay Master Petri if he wasn't going to go through with it anyway?

"For a certain price, he was willing to keep his options open. My cooperation is nevertheless not worth twice his original offer," Master Petri explained. "I should have accepted it. Now I have to lose you anyway, and for nothing."

"What do you mean?" Harry asked quickly, uneasiness beginning to creep upon him. Something about Master Petri's regretful tone seemed wrong. But Master Petri couldn't get rid of him or kill him, could he? The apprenticeship contract would prevent something like that, and it was not so easily nullified.

"I can't afford to be caught," Master Petri said, shaking his head. He raised his wand and intoned, " _Ich spreche dich frei._ "

Harry had to take back the last thought he had, because in fact, the apprenticeship contract _could_ be nullified instantly in one way, and that was by qualification. Harry obviously wasn't really qualified for anything, despite what Master Petri, who, he supposed, was no longer his teacher, had just said, but it wouldn't matter if, say, he was about to die. "Freedom" indeed.

Harry scrambled to his feet and dove to the side just in time to avoid a bright white spell that seemed to open a slash in the air as it went. He wasn't so lucky as to be able to resist a strong banishing charm, which sent him careening into the wall behind him, sending shocks of pain across his back.

Despite the uselessness of it, Harry reached for his wand, managing to grab it and point it at Petri. It was an absurd gesture, seeing as Harry didn't know any spells. He shut his eyes and tried to make peace with the inescapable reality of Petri's next overpowered severing charm.

A sudden glare seeped through his eyelids, like a flash of noonday sun, and he heard a crash and a pained yell. Cracking open his eyes, Harry saw with wonder that a shimmering golden dome had somehow sprung up around him, the pulsating, soft glow apparently emanating from his entire body, with his wand hand glowing most brightly.

Petri was now mirroring him up against the opposite wall, with the difference that he had crashed into a glass storage cabinet, which, no doubt thanks to unbreakable charms, had not shattered all over him, but instead had reciprocated the full force of his approach. His face was set in a noticeable rictus of pain, and he looked more than a little singed, though from what, Harry couldn't fathom.

He didn't have much time to make any other observations, however, before the soothing golden glow began to dissipate, and he felt suddenly hollow and alone, his wand again a useless stick in his hand. The room seemed far darker than it had been even before, and a paralysing, unanticipated fear welled from his chest to choke him.

Petri's wand arm slashed through the air with a snarled, _"Stupefy!"_ and the world disappeared behind a flash of red.


	10. Fugitive

The first thing Harry noticed when he awoke was that he was, well, awake. Alive.

He didn't feel too strange, either. He wasn't in pain at all, and he seemed to be sleeping on a bed. Cautiously, he opened his eyes fully and saw a white, strangely wrinkled-looking ceiling above him. He wasn't in his cot in Petri's closet; that was for certain. In fact, he did not recognise the room he was in at all, if it really was a room.

Besides being wrinkly, the ceiling also sloped downward at an increasingly great angle until it seemed to meld into the wall, and all of it was curved, as if he were inside a large dome.

Presently, a flap in the wall that he had not noticed opened up, and the unmistakable form of Petri entered. Harry scrambled to find his glasses, saw them on a dresser table beside the bed, and shoved them onto his face. His wand, alas, was not in as easy reach, being nowhere in sight.

Seeing as he wasn't dead, Harry supposed Petri had changed his mind about killing him. Harry was not sure what he thought about what had happened. Firstly, it was not clear whether he ought to feel betrayed. Having always known that Petri was not to be trusted and that he was entirely self-serving and, in a word, evil, Harry did not think that there had been anything to betray. All the same, perhaps some insidious sense of understanding, or at least a habit of day-to-day trust, had built itself between them, and the snapping of that tenuous thread left him feeling small and very alone.

Indeed then, perhaps Harry did feel betrayed. Looking at Petri didn't rouse any of that feeling, however, and elicited rather a vague but insistent nervousness. The pervasive loneliness didn't go away.

"You're awake," Petri said. Harry was surprised, because the man wasn't usually one for stating the obvious. He also hadn't spoken to Harry in English in a while. With a sudden burst of insight into his character, Harry realised that Petri must be feeling very awkward at the moment.

Harry nodded, electing to stay silent. He wasn't sure what would happen if he opened his mouth now; whether there would be an outpour of questions or accusations, and whether either of those things would lead to a good result.

"How are you feeling?" Petri asked, in exactly the wrong tone for those words. It probably wasn't a phrase he needed to use often.

After some consideration, Harry finally answered, simply, "Fine."

This response seemed to irritate Petri, but Harry could also tell that he was trying his best to make nice. Deciding that it couldn't hurt to make it easier, seeing as technically, he was still fully at Petri's mercy, Harry decided to provide a different topic.

"Where are we?" he asked.

This course of action seemed to be the right one, for Petri's funny expression relaxed slightly. "We're camping in a tent."

This tent was awfully house-like, Harry thought, but all the same the sloped canvas ceiling and the flap doors now made more sense. Probably it was enchanted all over with expansion charms and space-folding charms.

"I see," he said, a little lamely. He tried to think of something else to say.

Petri seemed to get tired of their charade at last and got to the point: "Look, I want to apologise for," he paused, and for a moment, looked like he wanted to employ a euphemism, but then thought better of it, "for trying to kill you off. I was being too hasty. I wasn't thinking things through. I let my anger get the better of me."

Harry had to admit privately that he was a little impressed. It had to have taken a lot out of Petri to own up to his mistake. Then again, he _had_ tried to murder his erstwhile apprentice for no good reason. The least he could do was apologise.

"It's fine," Harry said, even though it wasn't fine, because he really had no other option but to forgive Petri. He wouldn't forget it, though. It would be a mistake to let his guard down, for what little his guard was worth around a fully-trained dark wizard.

"It won't happen again," Petri said.

Indeed, Harry certainly hoped not.

"But if you're to continue to stay with me, which you must, unless you want into fall into Lucius Malfoy's hands, there is planning to do," Petri continued.

For a moment, Harry wondered whether it might just be better to go with Lucius Malfoy after all. Then he remembered that Lucius Malfoy was, at one point at least, a servant of the Dark Lord, whose defeat was associated with baby Harry. Also, Lucius Malfoy was slimy. There was no telling his motive. If there was any negative thing that Petri was not, it was slimy. On the contrary he just tended to be very straightforwardly evil.

Harry felt that he himself was also a straightforward person, and did not deal too well with sliminess. Even if he would be reluctant to admit it aloud, the likes of Malfoy would probably confound him with too many tricks and lies. And that was assuming Malfoy wanted him for a political reason of some kind, and not just to kill him.

"You'll have to trust me for now," said Petri, and Harry returned his attention to the man. He felt a sudden flash of anger now, a heated knot in his stomach.

"Trust you? How am I supposed to trust you after, after _that?_ " he demanded, unable to see straight for a moment. Then he remembered that he still had no means of self-defence, and that even if he was apologising, Petri was still in power. The knot of anger turned into one of worry, and then threatened to bubble into anger again at his helplessness.

Fortunately, Petri seemed to have expected some kind of outburst, and had perhaps even been worried before at the lack of one. "As you say, there can be no trust between us anymore. Therefore I am prepared to offer an Unbreakable Vow. It is vital that we can work together comfortably."

Harry frowned, failing to see how his cooperation was necessary. "Why? And how can a vow be unbreakable?"

"The penalty for breaking it is death, that's how. The situation now is that I am a fugitive, and you still need to be taught up to a reasonable journeyman level. I cannot teach you if you are always paranoid," Petri explained.

"You want to keep teaching me?" Harry demanded, a little bit bewildered.

"There are few practitioners of the craft, and I must eventually pass it on," Petri said. It was then that Harry realised that he was talking about the "other," and not just enchantment.

Still, it occurred to him that something was strange. "How did you qualify me before, if I wasn't qualified?" he wanted to know. "Did I actually get qualified?"

"Yes and no," Petri answered. "Like most paper contracts, the apprenticeship contract is mostly enforced legally, not magically. The only thing magical about it is the teaching oath and the no undue harm clause, both of which are weak because they are unspecific. To be officially qualified you must pass an exam by an authority. It used to be a guild; now it is a standard by the International Confederation of Wizards. I could declare you ready at any time, as you saw. After all, I did not expect you to sue me afterwards."

That effectively meant that Petri could have broken the contract at any time, if he had wished. "That seems unfair" Harry pointed out, "and unsafe."

Petri shrugged elegantly. "This same contract has been around for several hundred years. It tends to serve the majority fine. At least it isn't an entirely muggle piece of parchment."

Harry had to give him that. One couldn't rely on magic for everything, he supposed.

"So does that mean I'm still your apprentice?" Harry asked.

"If you like. We are not exactly able to use legal means right now, so it must be informal," Petri replied.

"We can't go back to your workshop, then?" Harry continued, trying to get a better grasp of what was going on. Petri had said something about being a fugitive. Aurors must have come then, like he had predicted. Harry assumed that that was the reason why they were now staying in a tent.

Petri nodded. "I've saved almost all my materials anyway. Rosenkol helped much. There was still enough evidence left over that they most certainly could give me the Kiss, however."

"The Kiss, like a dementor's kiss?" Harry repeated with some horror.

"Yes; capital punishment," Petri confirmed dismissively.

Harry frowned. "I thought you could control them."

Petri snorted. "Nobody can control dementors. You can use force, or reason with them, but no reason in the world will stop them from eating something helpless that they were told to eat."

Harry supposed that was fair, even if it was horrible.

"Anyway, let us do the vow. It's a ritual of three magical persons: the promisor, the recipient, and the bonder. Rosenkol will serve as our bonder. We clasp hands, you state the terms, and I agree to them. Simple enough," Petri said.

As he was gesticulating, Harry noticed for the first time that Petri's arm, the one that wasn't his wand arm, was wrapped in a cloth bandage. This was strange, since Harry knew that there was a simple charm for healing most surface wounds. Fixing the damage from flying into a wall could not have given Petri any trouble. Deciding that now would be an inappropriate time to inquire, he resolved to ask later when an opportunity came up.

Instead, Harry asked, "What terms are we doing again?"

Petri looked a little amused. "That I will not attempt to kill or maim you, perhaps. You can call it permanent harm. And that I will teach you my art as a master should his apprentice, and be responsible for you. Just like before. Is that enough for you?"

"That's a bit vague, and you said things like that were weak, before," Harry pointed out, still rather confused by how the vow worked. Did it work like the oath Petri used to take for his customers, where only the letter of the law needed to be followed? From what he had seen of things, magic didn't seem very good at enforcement.

"It doesn't matter," Petri said rather dismissively. "The Unbreakable Vow goes around usual limitations by using the bonder's magic. So the bonder's honest interpretation is all that matters."

"Rosenkol?" Harry muttered a little sceptically. "He hates me," he pointed out. "And he loves you."

Petri laughed. "Well you must take that into account then, when you speak."

Harry thought it was pointless to go through a vow if Petri expected to be able to evade it somehow. And he couldn't even tell if Petri was being truthful about how the vow worked. For all Harry knew, it might not even be real. Then again, everything Petri had ever told him about magic seemed to be true enough. Perhaps it was force of habit from being a teacher. One could hope.

"Let's make it a point that you won't try to find a loophole in the vow," Harry suggested. Assuming Petri had told the truth, not even Rosenkol could misinterpret that, right? And it was probably better than nothing.

"As you wish," Petri said equitably. Harry supposed that he probably did intend to keep his word, at least presently. But it was important to make sure that that did not change in the future, which was the whole point of the vow, anyway, he supposed.

"Are we doing it in English? Does he even speak English?" Harry remembered to ask.

"Yes, of course he does," Petri confirmed.

He summoned Rosenkol then, and instructed the strange house elf about the circumstances, in rapid German that Harry only caught the half of. Rosenkol nodded to show his understanding, and then shot Harry a somewhat surly look, as if blaming him for the necessity of such an action. Harry tried to look indifferent instead of annoyed. He still had no idea why the stupid house elf seemed to dislike him so much.

Then Petri gave Rosenkol his wand.

Harry thought he remembered reading somewhere that magical creatures were banned from using wands. Then again, even if that was the case, Petri was hardly the most law-abiding of fellows.

With the way the house elf went about wielding the wand, he had clearly used one before and probably knew much more about it than Harry did.

Petri knelt down and held out his right arm, and Harry copied him. They clasped hands, Petri's withered, long-fingered grip surprisingly warm and strong.

"Uh, what exactly do I do," a somewhat flustered Harry asked. Now that they were actually performing the vow, he realised that Petri had not really gone into sufficient detail.

"Ask me if I agree to the terms. 'Will you, Joachim Petri, do a certain thing?' I answer that I will, and you continue, 'And will you do the next thing?' and so on," Petri explained very nicely this time. Harry nodded, thankful also that he had mentioned his first name; by now Harry had nearly forgotten it, having never heard it used.

"Ready?" Rosenkol inquired in his slow, reedy voice. Both parties nodded. The elf set the tip of the wand to rest against their clasped hands and looked expectantly at Harry.

Taking a moment to think through what he was about to say, Harry began: "Will you, Joachim Petri, refrain from harming me permanently?"

"I will," said Joachim Petri solemnly.

A bright band of red light flared from the wand, like a tongue of fire and wound itself about their arms. Harry flinched slightly but continued, "And will you continue to teach me as a master should teach an apprentice?"

"I will," said Joachim Petri again. A second thread of light shot out and entwined itself with the first.

"And will you follow this vow honestly as you think I mean it, without using any loopholes?" That was the best Harry could do at short notice, for extra safeguard. Hopefully whatever complicated magic made this vow work would account for the rest.

"I will," said Joachim Petri for the last time, a glimmer of amusement appearing in his eye. A last red thread came to bind them together, and then the entire thing seemed to sink inside them, disappearing.

A heavy feeling that Harry had not even noticed before lifted suddenly, and it felt easier to breathe. Although it had occurred to Harry before the little ritual that it could be a lie and all for show, the atmosphere during the process and now afterwards helped marginally in convincing him of its authenticity. It remained to be seen how effective it actually was.

Petri let go of his hand and stood, dusting himself off. Rosenkol returned his wand, which he slid up his robe sleeve with a deft flick of the wrist. The house elf slunk out of the room, wearing his usual pinched expression.

"We should discuss safety, then. Right now we are in an unplottable part of a forest somewhere. A wizard who does not want to be found is very difficult to find – every government knows this, and they would not be looking for me, except that you are with me, and Lucius Malfoy no doubt has government friends. Therefore we must get rid of you," Petri said.

There it was again, this whole highly uncomfortable discourse about Harry and his removal from existence. Only the fact that Petri had literally just made that Unbreakable Vow, and that he could have easily killed Harry while he had been passed out, was keeping him from going on some kind of emotional rampage or perhaps trying to escape.

"There's a charm called the _fidelius_ charm," Petri began, quite unexpectedly, "It allows a secret to be kept completely hidden from discovery. Only the secret keeper can divulge the information contained in the secret. I'm sure you can see that it is either the strongest or weakest protection possible, as it is based on trust."

Harry nodded, though he really didn't see yet why Petri was bringing up this charm. Was he planning on making their location secret instead of unplottable? As far as Harry knew, making a place unplottable amounted to making it very hard to find except by accident or rote searching, since it made it impossible for anybody to communicate the location to anybody else in more than extremely general terms. That seemed more than enough to protect a campsite.

Petri continued, "I want to put your identity under the _fidelius_. Unfortunately, it requires trust, something we do not have enough of. It would be the best choice, if we could somehow do it."

"If I have to trust you," Harry pointed out, "then I can't."

Entirely unsurprised, Petri corrected, "Not me. I must cast the spell, and the caster cannot keep the secret. It would need to be Rosenkol."

"Are you serious?" Harry said, without much energy behind this query. He wouldn't say that it would be impossible for him to ever trust Rosenkol, the way trust between him and Petri was out of the question, but at the same time Harry and Rosenkol had a far worse relationship of mutual contempt, whereas he and Petri could be civil. Well, except when Petri had somehow decided to try to kill him.

"I believe you and Rosenkol can work out your differences. We will wait a month, and then if it does not work I will have other measures prepared," Petri declared.

A month hardly seemed like enough time to get to know the surly little cretin enough that Harry could trust him. Well, actually, perhaps it was. It depended on what was meant by "trust." At any rate, Harry did not say any of this aloud and instead asked, "What other measures?"

"A faked death would be best," replied Petri, pausing and frowning. "For that I will need to brew a polyjuice potion, in order to make an authentic body. But it can take up to a month, like I said, and I am no potions master. It is also riskier."

Harry certainly did not pretend to know the mechanics of making an "authentic" corpse, and decided that it was probably gruesome or terrible in some way or other. The _fidelius_ charm, as difficult as its requirement was, sounded at least mostly benign.

"I'll try with Rosenkol," he said, "if he tries too."

"You two had better start now," Petri suggested. "Madness, that I tolerated this ridiculous rivalry for so long."

 _Rivalry_ was an odd word to use, Harry thought, but he said nothing.

At this point, the door flap opened a crack and Rosenkol poked his head inside, revealing that he had probably been eavesdropping on their conversation this whole time. Not that it was technically eavesdropping, since Harry supposed nobody had ever stipulated that the house elf couldn't listen in, but it still seemed somehow rude.

"He's a muggle," Rosenkol complained in German, not even looking at Harry as he spoke. Petri sighed.

"That's exactly what you said to me when you first saw me," he retorted. Rosenkol had the grace to look sheepish.

"Master Joachim has shown Rosenkol he was wrong. Master Joachim is strong," he muttered.

"Harry isn't a muggle. He's uneducated. You can teach him," Petri told the house elf. He turned to Harry, "Rosenkol is right, of course. It's about time you learned to cast spells."

At this, Harry could not help but feel a sudden burst of excitement. "You mean I'm old enough, finally?"

"You told me you were born at the end of July, right? Yesterday or the day before must have been your birthday," Petri informed him, "And that is good enough." Harry blinked at this.

"How long was I asleep?" he asked, glancing back at the rumpled bed as if it would give him any hints. He didn't feel stiff or hungry, but that could easily be attributed to magic.

"About a week," was the reply. "You dangerously overextended an enchantment."

Overextending an enchantment, Harry had learned before, happened when an enchantment that was sustained by a wizard somehow started drawing an increasingly great flow of magic, causing heavy physical and mental strain that could be deadly. The classic example, from which the name had probably originated, was casting any extension charm on something that already had the undetectable extension charm on it, which could have drastic consequences, first overextension and then an explosive blast.

Except Harry didn't think he was in possession of any enchanted items that could react that way, or that he had done anything of the sort.

Or had he? He recalled the golden dome that had sprung up to shield him from Petri's attacks. It must have been accidental magic, perhaps amplified by the wand in his hand, but he still didn't see how that counted as an enchantment.

"How?" Harry finally asked.

Petri shook his head. "There was a complex protective enchantment on you. I've never seen anything like it before. It burned me badly; certainly strong dark magic."

He held up his bandaged left hand, which Harry had forgotten about. Harry supposed that magical injuries must be much more difficult to heal.

"I had an enchantment on me? Why?" Harry wondered aloud. "Is it still there?"

"I don't know why. And no; it broke, unfortunately, after it drew too much power. Otherwise you might have died," Petri replied.

Harry nodded, and then noticed that "unfortunately" had been put in the same statement as "otherwise you might have died," and frowned. He still couldn't tell whether Petri would rather see him dead or alive. It was maddening.

"Don't worry about it. And here is your wand." Petri reached into his robe pocket and produced the familiar stick of willow and dragon heartstring. Willow was apparently a very good wood for charms. Petri's wand was also made of willow, though Harry didn't know what the core was.

Harry took his own wand and felt a familiar sense of acceptance, not quite warm but comforting nonetheless.

"The mug—mudblood wants to learn?" Rosenkol piped up, still not looking at Harry.

Harry wanted to point out that he wasn't a mudblood either, but decided that it would not be worth the effort to argue, and furthermore that it would be entirely the wrong approach to dealing with the cranky old house elf.

"Yes, I do," he said. Rosenkol finally deigned to look at him. There was a very dull, unenthused look in his big black eyes.

They stared uncomfortably at each other for a few moments before Rosenkol finally spoke _to_ him, for once. "First charm, lighting charm. You can do it, can't you? If you are not a muggle or a squib."

Suddenly, Harry wasn't feeling exactly as confident as before, seeing as the derisive Rosenkol and also his real teacher, Petri, were watching him closely. He recalled that the incantation was _lumos_ , felt less sure than he wanted to be that he recalled correctly, and tried to steel himself.

It was just a lighting charm, right? The simplest charm in the book. It didn't even have a wand movement. Even a near-squib could do it, and Harry wasn't a squib.

" _Lumos,_ " he said clearly, not sure what to expect, though he had his eyes trained on the tip of his wand. A weak glow appeared, and then extinguished itself. Harry felt his heart sink along with it.

"Tch," Rosenkol said, which showed exactly what he thought of the attempt.

Petri was much more charitable, and more forthcoming with help: "Decent. You need to focus on the result you want and stress the first syllable more."

Steeling himself, Harry tried again. " _Lumos,_ " he pronounced with more determination this time, trying his best to expect a beam of light to sprout from his wand.

It worked, sort of. He saw it, had to look away, noticed it wavering a little and tried to keep his resolve. The beam steadied.

"Very good," Petri said, nodding. "This is a simple first projection spell. All projection spells have the same form as the lighting spell, a beam of light from your wand."

Harry nodded, remembering the basics of the theory he had read about before.

"And what are the other types of spells?" Petri asked him.

"Kinetic," Harry recalled, "and alteration and, er, creation."

"Good," Petri confirmed. "Charms of all types are commonly seen, but I hope you recall that a majority of charms are kinetic spells. Very few non-charms are kinetic, and this is an advantage of charms."

Harry nodded. He did remember learning about all this, now that Petri provided him with a refresher.

Now Petri turned to Rosenkol, and ordered, some exasperation colouring his tone, "Just teach him like that, yes? He will soon upgrade himself to his rightful half-blood status."

With that rather strange exhortation, Petri exited the room, the door flapping behind him.

Now that Harry was alone with Rosenkol, he felt the awkwardness of the room increase twofold. Rosenkol looked from the door to Harry and then back to the door, and then gave a funny sigh.

He snapped his fingers, and a huge, familiar tome appeared in his spindly hands. It was _The_ _Complete Compendium of Charms_. This appeared to be the English copy.

"Wizardling can learn all of these," Rosenkol declared. He dropped the book on the floor and opened it to the first page. "Amplifying charm," he said, pointing, after some consideration.

To his credit, it wasn't just the first charm on the page. The first charm on the page was the absorption charm, and it was followed by the acceleration charm. He didn't know anything about either of them and they were probably far beyond his level, judging from the many drawings of flying brooms that dominated half the page.

Harry looked at the indicated entry under Rosenkol's pointed fingernail.

"Amplifying charm. _Sonorus._ Tap-durative. The amplifying charm amplifies all sound exiting a certain radius. Common uses: voice or music amplification. Countercharm: quieting charm," the entry's introduction read.

It didn't look very useful, but Harry supposed it also didn't look all that hard. He searched for something to cast it on; he certainly wasn't going to try a new spell on himself.

Deciding that the side table by the bed was a good choice, he tapped his wand over it and pronounced, " _Sonorus_." Then he hit his wand against it experimentally, to make a sound, and decided he couldn't tell the difference if it had got louder, so the spell had probably failed.

"Stupid human is pronouncing it wrong," Rosenkol said helpfully, without giving the correct pronunciation. Scowling, Harry looked back at the book and scanned the pronunciation guide again. Rosenkol had been right, but the elf could have been less smug about it.

He tried again, pronouncing it seemingly correctly that time, but still achieving no effect.

"I don't get it," he said, waiting for some further barb about stupidity. He wasn't disappointed.

"Idiot cannot imagine result correctly. You should try again until it works," Rosenkol told him, before taking a few steps back and then settling on the bed, lying down as if about to go to sleep.

Harry noticed that the elf usually talked about everything in third person, but occasionally switched to addressing Harry directly. Since the Rosenkol clearly had not got over his dislike, Harry deduced that second person address was probably the elven version of being extra rude.

From Rosenkol's dismissive remarks, Harry figured that he was now pronouncing the spell correctly, so he just needed to believe in it and visualise it for it to work.

That was easier said than done, however. He spent the next half hour tapping the wooden table and working himself into a rage, still unable to get any effect from the spell.

It was this scene of incessant tapping of the wand and chanting of " _Sonorus!_ " that Petri walked in upon some time later. Rosenkol was curled up on the bed with his back turned, ears pressed to his skull and grumbling to himself, and Harry was practically bludgeoning the poor table with his stick of willow.

"Harry," Petri said dryly, and Harry stopped, suddenly noticing his own state of disarray and feeling a little shameful. "Rosenkol," Petri said in the same tone. The elf abruptly rolled off the bed and onto his feet, head down in contrition.

"Rosenkol begs Master Joachim for forgiveness," he said, though it hardly sounded like begging to Harry.

Petri gave a long-suffering sigh. "You will stop this petulance at once. It doesn't put you in a favourable light. He cannot learn if he is not taught. And Harry, if it doesn't work, repeating the same thing will not help."

"What do I do, then?" Harry asked, out of ideas.

"Try a different spell," Petri suggested. "The amplifying charm is not the ideal first alteration spell, even though it is in principle not difficult. You would do better with the colour-changing charm, _colovaria_."

"I'll try that, then," Harry agreed, glad to having something new to attempt. He thought he could see how the effects of the colour-changing charm would be much easier to imagine than those of the amplifying charm.

" _Colovaria,_ " he incanted, imitating Petri's pronunciation as he tapped the side table again, this time imagining the whole thing in green.

To his delight, it worked on the first try, even if not quite to the extent he would have liked; a radius of the table's surface turned an uneven forest green, as well as some part of the sides, so it looked like someone had cracked a large green egg overhead and it had splattered inelegantly.

"Keep practicing until you can control the area and consistency," Petri advised. He took out his own wand and gave it a negligent flick. The whole square top of the table turned a solid dark blue, the wood grain no longer visible except with close scrutiny. Another flick of the wand, and the table looked like it had been expertly stained, the shade of blue varying with the light and dark patterns of the original wood. One last wave of his wand dispelled the charm.

"I don't need to actually tap the table then?" Harry asked, noticing that Petri had not made contact.

"The closer you are to the target, the easier the spell is, and a tap is usually recommended. You should begin with that," Petri explained. Harry nodded.

"Right. Thank you, sir," he said, glad for any advice. The experience of actually being able to do magic was unlike any other; there was something viscerally satisfying about achieving results from wand-waving.

"I will leave you to it, then. Try to get along this time," Petri told them, though Harry was vindicated to see that he seemed to be directing the latter statement more towards Rosenkol than Harry.

When Petri had once more departed, Rosenkol knelt down on the ground with a pensive expression on his face. It made him look marginally less wrinkled, and Harry left him to thinking while he tried to improve his colour-changing charm, encouraged by the way it actually seemed to respond to his desires.

Perhaps an hour later, when Harry was critically admiring his solidly bright pink side table and lamp, Rosenkol exited his stupor and moved to stand beside him.

"Wizardling works hard," the elf commented. Harry blinked at him before deciding that it must be a compliment.

"Thanks," he said somewhat awkwardly.

"Rosenkol will apologise to wizardling for thinking he is a muggle. Master Joachim is right, and Rosenkol is being petulant, and will stop," the elf said.

Harry didn't exactly know what petulant meant, but if it was indeed what the elf had been before, then he would be glad to see a change.

"Let's try to start over, then?" Harry said uncertainly. He held out his hand. Rosenkol looked at it for an uncomfortably long time before he reached out and took it in his own spindly one, giving it a surprisingly firm shake.

"Wizardling offers Rosenkol hand like an equal. Perhaps he is a good wizardling after all," remarked the elf. Harry wasn't quite sure what to make of it. Now that Rosenkol seemed to be acting weirdly nice, Harry didn't want to ruin anything by offending him.

"Well, actually, Rosenkol is actually definitely better than Harry. At magic, anyway," Harry tried, finding it a little bit absurd to talk in third person but worried that second person might be somehow rude.

He seemed to have done the right thing, because Rosenkol suddenly brightened up considerably.

"Wizardling Harry addresses Rosenkol as his superior!" he exclaimed in clear astonishment. That wasn't exactly what Harry had intended, but now would be a bad time to say anything to the contrary. The elf seemed very excited, indeed, and nothing like his usual bitter self.

"Rosenkol will teach him," said the elf, almost to himself. "Yes, Rosenkol will make him worthy of Master."


	11. Nobody

Rosenkol was not such an odd elf after all, Harry had come to realise. He loved his master and was willing to do just about anything for him. If Petri were to give him clothes, he would be devastated. And he was sensitive to human kindness and cruelty. The whole time Harry had disliked Rosenkol, he had failed to consider the elf as a person, too put-off by his strange appearance and prickly demeanour. But any person would object to a talentless newcomer taking all the attention of a loved one. Rosenkol had been _jealous_ of Harry.

Harry rather thought that Rosenkol could have as much of Petri's attention as he wanted; as far as Harry was concerned, it was a bad thing. Petri, however, seemed to disagree, because he really was teaching Harry things now, drilling him in what seemed like pointless magical theory every moment of every day with strange urgency. Harry could see where Rosenkol was coming from. The elf got relegated to a reluctant teaching assistant. Somehow, they managed to bond over their shared unhappiness with the situation.

Living in a tent on the run had not improved Petri's character at all, and if anything, had changed it for the worse. Paranoia, of the incredibly excessive sort, was now the rule. They had moved their tent six times already for no reason. Petri seemed convinced that, at any moment, aurors were going to barge through the dense undergrowth, blast open their protection circle, and give them all the Dementor's Kiss.

Harry had believed him for about a week, during which he had remained holed up inside the tent, terrified of even sticking his head outside for fear crossing the spell perimeter, before it soon became evident, in Harry's opinion, that nobody was after them at all.

And why would they be? Petri had been dealing in illegal dark magic, but now that he was gone pursuing him was surely pointless and a waste of time, especially as the business was not continuing. Petri continued to insist that Lucius Malfoy would be looking for Harry, but Harry didn't see any reason for that to be the case. Maybe the man had been interested in him while he had been _right there_ , but to care enough to hunt him down now? Harry didn't see what use Malfoy could possibly have for him.

It hadn't been two weeks before Petri had driven himself mad and demanded that the whole matter of Harry's identity be dealt with post haste.

Thus Harry, Rosenkol, and Petri stood in an intimate triangle in the middle of the tent's parlour. They had rehearsed this earlier, to make sure Harry didn't botch it up, but it was honestly really easy. Petri was doing the majority of the hard work, which was the actual magic part.

His wand started in the air a little above Harry's head. He looked very serious, and Harry was reminded of an orchestra conductor he had seen once on the telly, baton raised very stilly, as if he were balancing the music on the tip and would drop it all if he moved a moment too soon. Petri slashed diagonally, narrowly missing Rosenkol's wrinkled forehead, and Harry took it as the cue to begin.

"Rosenkol," he said, fighting the urge to clear his throat. No extra sounds. "Can I trust you?"

"You can," said the elf, his bulbous black eyes staring straight into Harry's. Eye contact was important. Petri's wand swirled in unerring circles above them.

"Will you keep my confidence?" asked Harry. Petri's hand stilled.

"I shall," said Rosenkol. The wand burst into motion again.

Harry swallowed. His head was swimming with the pressure of the great sweeps of Petri's wand, each motion like a jarring, heavy blow. "This is my secret. I am Harry Potter."

At once, the pressure disappeared, and Harry's eyes suddenly felt too big for his head. He clutched at his forehead, and was alarmed to feel wetness between his fingers. He stared at the bright smear of blood on his hand.

Petri flicked his wand at Harry, and then once again. He felt some kind of tingling, but it could have been his imagination. A frown came over Petri's face.

"Your scar," he said. "It's bleeding."

"You can't heal it?" Harry asked, knowing that it was uncharacteristic of Petri to state the obvious. Or perhaps it wasn't so obvious. The scar was almost as old as he was, from the car crash—no, from the Dark Lord, apparently, and it had never been more than a wicked (or hideous, if you asked Aunt Petunia) artefact. It had certainly never bled before. Unable to stop himself, Harry pressed his hand to it again, and confirmed that it was still bleeding.

"It's a curse scar," Petri said, sounding entirely unconvinced by his own excuse.

Nodding anyway, Harry asked, "Did the _fidelius_ work?"

Petri sneered, and Harry flinched in reflex, realising that it was probably unwise to question a master enchanter's charmwork. In his defence, it was Petri who had been going on and on for days about how difficult and finicky the charm was, and Harry had seen him actually practising the wand movements when he thought no one was looking.

"It worked," Petri said. Harry wanted to ask how he knew, thought better of it, and then was spared the need when Petri waved his wand and summoned a handheld mirror, which zoomed precariously past Harry's face. Petri caught expertly by a protruding knot on its wooden frame. He turned it so Harry could see and asked, "What do you see?"

Harry peered into the mirror and, to his astonishment, did not find his reflection standing next to Petri. "I'm gone!"

"Idiot boy, it's a foe-glass. It shows your enemies, not you," Petri said, scowling. Harry wasn't sure what to say to that.

Staring up at him from the mirror, wearing an identically menacing expression, was Petri's reflection, clear as day.

Petri sighed deeply. "You see me, don't you?" He tossed the mirror like a frisbee, and it miraculously landed back in its place on a shelf. "I'm hardly your enemy."

Even as he said this, Harry was convinced more than ever that in fact, Petri was his enemy, and had been ever since the making of the horcrux. Funnily enough, he didn't feel anger or hatred, exactly, as he would have naively expected enmity to feel like. There was just festering apathy, like Petri wasn't a person, but just something standing in his way. In his way to what, he wasn't sure.

Harry noticed that he had awkwardly failed to respond, but just as he was grappling for something to say that wouldn't get him hexed, Petri said, "Lucius Malfoy is back in the shadows. We are safe. You are safe."

He put a hand on Harry's shoulder, unexpectedly. Harry almost pulled away, except that there was something genuinely fatherly about the gesture that bewildered him. Was Petri really trying to rebuild the trust he himself had admitted had been made impossible, even unnecessary, between them by the Unbreakable Vow? Maybe it was some new game.

Petri gave him a little push to turn him toward the door, and then walked past him. "Come. Now that we are safe, we can begin your proper education in the Other. What you can take care of today you do not delay to the morrow."

By this, Harry figured he meant that there was no time like the present, so he followed wordlessly, still a little puzzled by Petri's sudden good humour. Maybe the threat of Lucius Malfoy really had been worse than Harry had appreciated.

Harry hurried through the tent flap that served as a door before it could fall and hit him in the face. Petri's long stride traversed the hallway in seconds and Harry was scrambling to keep up. Petri stopped at the last flap, which led to his study, and held it open in wait.

The tent was way too massive, Harry thought privately, as he thanked Petri in reflex and stepped inside. In fact, it was bigger than Petri's actual flat had ever been. He didn't understand why people didn't just live inside tents all the time, or why Petri hadn't enchanted his home to be bigger, or at least more comfortable.

"You'll need your wand," Petri said.

Harry reached into his robe pocket and rummaged around a bit, but the familiar stick was not there. "Sorry, I think I left it in my room."

Petri sighed, but his cheerful mood thankfully did not evaporate. "A wizard must always be with his wand. Well? What are you waiting for? Go get it."

Harry found Rosenkol in his room, holding up his wand and levitating all the furniture at once.

"Hey, that's mine," Harry protested. Rosenkol didn't even flinch, but a moment later, he dropped the wand, and all the furniture with it. Something cracked loudly. Harry cursed, but then Rosenkol raised his hand, snapped once, and the room was back in perfect order.

Rosenkol backed away from the wand like it had suddenly turned poisonous. Harry paused as he bent down to pick it up, wondering if maybe the elf had done something to it, but then dismissed the thought. Rosenkol had his weird habits, but he wasn't a practical joker, and besides, Harry thought that they had come to an understanding. He hoped so, anyway, if that _fidelius_ charm was supposed to have meant something. He grabbed the wand and shoved it in his pocket.

"What were you doing anyway?" he asked the elf.

"Rosenkermermmrm," Rosenkol mumbled.

"What?" Harry wondered why he was being so evasive.

"Rosenkol was practising," the elf said more clearly.

"Practising what?" Harry asked.

"Magic," was the unenlightening reply.

Harry scowled. "With my wand?"

"Wizardling has lessons to be getting to, doesn't he?" Rosenkol asked in an abysmal attempt at avoiding the subject, except that he had a point. Harry didn't have time for this.

"Whatever," he muttered, returning to the study where an impatient Petri was standing over an open trunk.

"There you are. What took you so long?" he asked as Harry entered.

"Rosenkol had my wand," he said, figuring that it wouldn't hurt to mention it. He didn't quite care if the elf got in trouble.

Petri just brushed it aside, however. "This again," he said. "He thinks it will make him more powerful. If you don't want him using your wand, then you should keep better track of it. Now come on, get inside."

Inside? Harry soon realised that Petri meant the trunk. He moved closer, and saw that in fact it looked more like a trap door, with a ladder leading down into darkness, than a portable case. It had obviously been thoroughly expanded.

Awkwardly, he turned around and dropped one foot inside, waving it around until it caught on a ladder rung with a clang, and then manoeuvred the rest of his body into place so that he could lower himself without getting stuck. The ladder wasn't as long as he had expected, and the room less dark than he had thought. A row of clear jars on a counter against the back wall each contained a bright, consistently cyan fire that seemed to burn nothing – Harry was pleased to recognise them as bluebell flames, one variant of the fire-making charm.

With a thump, Petri landed heavily on the ground behind him, evidently having foregone use of the ladder. With a jab of his wand the ladder seemed to collapse in on itself until it formed a grille over the entrance, and the trunk lid slammed shut.

"The workshop is in the back," he said, walking past Harry and ducking through a heavy velvet curtain which Harry hadn't noticed. He followed hastily, and found himself crammed into a small vestibule of sorts with Petri, just in time to see the man withdraw a thin silver knife and make a deep cut in his forearm. Petri pressed his wounded arm against the wall and smeared his blood onto the stone.

The wall briefly blazed silver with the outline of a doorway, before fading again. Petri had already exchanged the knife for his wand and healed his arm. Then he walked straight through the wall.

Harry hesitated for a moment, wondering if he would have to repeat what Petri had just done, but his fears were laid to rest as he reached out and found that, despite looking as solid as ever, the wall provided as much resistance as thin air.

"Why didn't you use that other spell?" Harry asked as he came through the wall. The room on the other side was stone and hexagonal, and lit all around by torches with bluebell flames. Petri stood in front of a tall, intricately carved stone slab at the centre of the room, which apparently served as a table. He shot Harry an unimpressed look, and he quickly tried to elaborate, "I mean, for your blood. You cut yourself." He gestured vaguely, glancing to Petri's arm.

"It's an injury-based curse, the Markowski Trap," Petri explained. "Blood alone is not enough."

"Trap?" Harry asked.

"You cannot recover while inside, and you cannot leave without injuring yourself again," Petri said.

Harry frowned. "But you healed yourself before going in, so what's the point?"

"The curse is for enemies, not myself. It can be a nasty surprise. Enough. You are years away from designing permanent protections. The task today is special animation."

Petri motioned for Harry to join him at the table. Harry saw that there was a blank leaf of parchment in front of him, and a very large, motionless spider on top. He recoiled a little, wondering if it was dead. He did not have to wonder for long.

" _Avada Kedavra!_ " Petri incanted with surprising intensity, jabbing his wand violently. A horrible rushing sound and a hauntingly familiar flash of green light robbed Harry of his breath. He had seen that light before, in his dreams. He always used to think it was the light from a traffic signal during the car crash, but he knew better now. It was a sicklier colour, green for death, not life.

The spider tipped over onto its back, legs curled up.

"That was the killing curse," Harry was surprised to hear himself say. Petri, too, looked rather surprised at his knowledge.

"Yes. Doubtlessly you are wondering why I cast the killing curse on a spider. That was to kill it without injuring it at all. Unfortunately, the killing curse is the only spell that can manage such a feat. You will be bringing it back to life, a far easier task."

"Easier?" Harry repeated a little incredulously.

"You feel comfortable with the general animation charm?" Petri asked, ignoring his disbelief. Harry nodded. After mastering the colour-change charm, Harry had moved on to the levitation charm, which had a very finicky swish-and-flick wand movement that took him days to get right. The swish-and-flick was, apparently, the beginning and end movement to an entire host of kinetic charms, the general animation charm among them. Harry had been practising making fruits walk around for the past week.

"I thought that just made things move," he said.

"Yes," said Petri, the beginnings of impatience creeping into his tone. Harry resolved not to interrupt again. "The animation charm moves things according to your will. Magic is will. Living things have their own will, and to raise the dead is to give back the will of life through magic."

This made a certain kind of poetic sense to Harry, except that he still had no idea what to do.

"You need to begin with the basic animation charm on the corpse, and then slowly remove your own will from it without ending the spell. That's the most important part," Petri said.

"Could you show me?" Harry asked.

Petri pointed his wand at the spider, gave the negligent swish, twirl, and flick of an extremely contracted animation charm, and the spider twitched and began flailing its legs desperately. He lowered his wand, but the spider continued to move, managing to right itself. It began skittering around, and was about to go off the edge of the table when Petri slashed his wand abortively and ended the spell. It tumbled over on the spot, dead again.

While admittedly amazing, Harry decided that the demonstration had shown him approximately nothing about how it was actually done, beyond what Petri had already said.

Still, Petri was looking at him expectantly, so he took out his own wand and pointed it at the dead spider.

" _Locomotor_ ," he said, swishing his wand and then beginning to spin it in a circle. He felt something pooling in his palm, where it met his wand, but it wasn't enough. " _Locomotor,_ " he repeated, and then began saying it at intervals. The spider twitched, and Harry flicked his wand, feeling the familiar sense of something connecting him to the target as the spell completed. The spider rolled to its feet, but with an air of uncertainty; Harry was still controlling it, and he wasn't sure what to make it do. It stood still.

"Pull back your will," Petri said. Harry tried not think about the spider, but this was apparently not the right move because the connection snapped and the spider crumpled, lifeless.

"I don't understand," Harry said.

"Keep trying," Petri said. "I'll leave you to it."

"You're not staying?" Harry asked, a little alarmed. Despite himself, he felt rather intimidated by the vault-like room.

"I don't expect you to succeed soon. Likely not today. I cannot help you any further, as this is a skill you must figure out for yourself. When you're done for the day, you know what to do," Petri said, reaching into his pocket and producing his silver knife again. He cut himself with only a minimal flinch, and then tossed the knife onto the table. Before Harry could voice any other kind of protest he strode over to the wall, gave it his blood, and phased through it. Harry had half a mind to run after him, but he squashed the wild impulse.

He glanced at the knife, noticing that it was completely pristine. It must be enchanted. Just thinking about cutting himself made him feel queasy. He resolved to figure out the spell before he left, because he was sure anyway that he would be spending the next day in here, and the next, until he managed it.

Five hours later, according to the time-telling spell, this resolve was wearing thin. Harry hadn't anticipated just how hungry he would be, and how badly it would mess up his focus. Lunch, just before the casting of the _fidelius_ , felt like an eternity ago, and with every " _locomotor"_ he incanted his stomach seemed to twist a little further.

"I know," he said aloud, glaring at his navel. He rubbed his stomach and it alleviated the pain for about two seconds, before it came back even worse than before.

The spider was still dead, and maybe a little worse for wear after having walked off the table two or three times. Harry was still disgusted by the thought of touching it, and had used the opportunity to practise the levitation charm again. Basic as it was, it was his favourite charm (out of the four he knew) just because it felt quintessentially like magic. It was proof that he was a wizard, that despite everything that had happened to him he had left the Dursleys for somewhere better.

Harry cast the animation charm on the spider again, the movements now natural to his hand after a few hundred iterations. The spider stood woodenly. He knew it wasn't alive yet, but it was still amazing, still magic.

He had the potential to learn everything that Petri had to teach, and more. He would even surpass Petri one day – and then what?

Briefly, his mind flashed to the thought of getting rid of Petri. Killing him? No, that would be wrong, wouldn't it? Ungrateful. But actually, after what Petri had put him through, he didn't think anything would be considered ungrateful anymore. He hadn't asked for this teaching.

Suddenly seized by the understanding that the things he was thinking were horrible, Harry scrambled desperately to grasp a feeling he was sure he knew like the back of his hand. Killing was wrong, totally, obviously wrong, for obvious reasons. Reasons.

It was wrong, just like being ungrateful was wrong, and being rude. No, it was different, wrong in a different way, but he couldn't remember how. He knew it was true but the reason was just out of his reach. If he just thought a little harder…

He was distracted by a flash of movement out of the corner of his eye. It was the spider, and it was crawling down the side of the desk, and Harry recoiled, holding his wand out in front of him protectively. There was no need; as soon as he even thought of warding off the spider the life left it again and it hit the ground.

He had done it just then, somehow, kept the magic going without imposing his will. Was the key just to get distracted? But that was clearly not it, because he had tried that for the first two hours to no effect whatsoever. The magic always ended when he stopped paying attention. What had been different this time?

Harry animated the spider again and tried to make it crawl up the desk. This was more difficult than he had anticipated, because he had no idea what a spider needed to do in order to stay on the surface instead of falling off. He wished he could leave it up to the spider, but this wishing did nothing to give it life, so he gave up and levitated it, before resuming the animation spell.

What had he been thinking about before, when the spell had worked? Right, he had been trying to figure out why killing was especially wrong. It felt weird to even think about it, because it was just one of those facts he knew, like he knew the world was round and two plus two made four. So why was it so hard to understand it?

Glancing at the spider from the corner of his eye, Harry confirmed that his spell had failed sometime in his moment of thought, and it lay there pathetically. He exhaled sharply in frustration. It didn't count as success if he only managed it that one time and couldn't do it again. The point was to learn the spell properly.

His stomach growled.

Impulsively, he grabbed the knife, but then he was faced with the actual prospect of cutting himself and he dropped it again. He wasn't ready to give up just yet.

He was about to cast the spell again, but decided that trying the same thing over and over again was probably not the way to go about it. He had done it once. It wasn't what he had been thinking about that mattered, because he had tried that. But what had been so special about that attempt?

Thinking about it a while longer did nothing, and, even more frustrated, he cast the spell again, jabbing the wand a little too harshly. The spider fell over, and its legs twitched wildly. Shocked, Harry lost his grip on the spell again. It had moved on its own again. Why?

His emotion, Harry realised. Well, frustration he had in spades. He tried again, and the spider flailed about again, but once it managed to right itself it stood placidly, no matter how annoyed Harry got at it.

Eventually, he was too tired to keep trying, but that only made the prospect of giving up worse, because he didn't even have the energy to face the thought of opening the wall. It didn't feel worth it.

He sat down on the floor and leaned against the side of the table. The carvings of strange faces dug into his back, but at least the stone was a comfortable temperature, and not nearly as cold as its appearance suggested. He wondered if Petri would come back if he stayed here too long. What if he starved to death?

Then he berated himself for being silly. He knew how to get out. It wasn't as if he was actually trapped. He just didn't see the need to leave yet. If he were actually starving, and not just "starving," as his stomach helpfully reminded him with a painful twist, he could do something about it.

He fell asleep to that cheerful thought.

When he woke up with a horrible cramp in his neck, there was a tray with a few slices of bread and a bowl of cabbage soup on the table, next to the parchment with the spider, which looked a little dried out. Never had he been so happy to see one of Rosenkol's bland, uninspired attempts at cooking. He grabbed the spoon and brought the bowl closer to himself. It was still warm. The tasteless cabbage broth relieved his parched throat. His stomach renewed its demands in earnest, and he wolfed down the breakfast in a matter of minutes.

More refreshed than he had expected, he set to his task again, eager to escape the awful room with something to show for it. However, he found the spider rather resistant to moving on its legs today. He imagined that spending so much time being dead was not really conducive to its health.

Harry shook his head to try to redact the nonsense that had just passed through it. He was going mad.

He heard footsteps behind him, and whirled around with some horror. Thankfully, they were a not further indication of burgeoning insanity; Petri had entered the room.

"Er, morning, sir," Harry greeted lamely. Was it even morning?

"You'll be needing a new spider," Petri said, getting straight to the point. Harry was glad to hear it.

He was less glad when he remembered that Petri would be casting the killing curse again. There was something viscerally unsettling about witnessing the curse in action.

Petri did not produce another spider, however, and was instead inspecting the somewhat shrivelled one which Harry had been using.

"Not as bad as I expected," he said to himself. He took out his wand and cast the animation charm himself. The spider got up with apparent reluctance, but then with a few vigorous twirls of Petri's wand it seemed to regain its former lustre. Even when he released the spell, the spider looked freshly dead.

"You fixed it," Harry said with some wonder. Petri nodded.

"I'd rather avoid casting the killing curse if I don't need to," he said.

This was the first Harry remembered ever hearing from Petri that sounded like something a halfway-decent human being would say.

Then, Harry had to ruin the moment by asking, "Why not?" It made him sound like the one who was a horrible person, but his curiosity demanded to be satisfied.

Petri smiled at him in a knowing way that made his hackles rise. It wasn't as if he had meant it in a bad way.

"It's a taxing spell, with many requirements. You could cast it at me with full intent to kill right now and I might get a headache," Petri said.

Harry supposed that if it was as easy as yelling " _Avada Kedavra"_ and jabbing a wand at an enemy, people could just use it willy-nilly, unforgivable or not, and be unstoppable.

"Would you like to study it?" Petri asked. Harry shook his head post haste. He would never use a spell like that.

That seemed like a childish reason, so Harry said instead, "Didn't you just say it's very hard? I can't even do this animation yet."

Petri inclined his head. "Quite. Tell me about your progress on animation, then."

Relieved that the topic had moved away from killing, Harry said, somewhat eagerly, "Well, I managed to do it yesterday, once. Or maybe twice, in a way. But I couldn't get it to work again."

"Explain what you were doing when you succeeded," Petri ordered, attentive.

"It, well, that is, I'm not really sure. I got distracted and then I saw that it was running around. But the second time I was really frustrated, and then it started to move on its own to get up, but it stopped moving after that," Harry said. Petri nodded.

After a moment, he said, "Your own emotion as a starting point. Interesting. What you are doing, I believe, is imparting your emotional state on the spider instead of your direct will. The spider's will does not fit well with your emotions, so you have only partial animation. It's a start, but you need to be able to pull yourself away entirely. The spider must regain its own will."

Harry nodded, seeing that that was the best explanation he was going to get. At least Petri had managed to clear up what Harry had been doing before, which was helpful, even though the next step was still as opaque as ever.

Armed with this new knowledge, he thought about what kinds of things a spider might feel, and figured that, with all the skittering about, fear or anxiety was likely.

" _Locomotor,_ " he cast, and tried to pull up the feeling of being afraid. The spider started moving, but then Harry got excited and it twitched erratically for a bit before the spell broke entirely.

"You must make sure in the end not to rely on your own emotion," Petri said. "I also advise you not to spend the night in here again. I doubt it was comfortable."

Harry nodded, and Petri made his way to the wall, producing another silver knife to cut himself with. Harry didn't understand how he could injure himself so casually. Perhaps the ability to heal himself straight away made it easier.

Eventually, Harry managed the spell, and for all that it worked and he could make it work fairly consistently, he couldn't explain to anybody _how_ he was actually doing it. At a certain point, the process of untangling his will from the magic just clicked, and it became one of those skills which, like whistling loudly with one's fingers, theoretically had a theory behind it but ended up being a matter of personal technique.

Now there was the matter of leaving. He thought about waiting for Petri to come back and leave with him, but the prospect of being bored for an indeterminate amount of time seemed intolerable, so he mustered up his courage and grasped the knife. How bad could it be, anyway?

Armed with the thrill of success, he managed to blindside self-preservation with a quick slice to his arm, the way he remembered Petri doing it. Even though he was sure Petri would be able to heal whatever he managed to do to himself, he didn't want to sever anything vital.

The knife barely hurt going in and coming out, so thin was the blade. Then the pain came on all at once, burning, and Harry hurriedly smeared some blood on the appropriate spot on the wall. The shape of the door appeared, telling him that it had worked, and he walked through without incident.

The ladder was down and the trunk open, so he climbed up with one arm, awkwardly holding his other one out of the way. It was bleeding, but not enough that it needed to be staunched with anything, and he didn't want to get it all over himself.

Petri was seated behind his desk, reading a book, and looked up as Harry exited. He motioned for Harry to come to him, and took out his wand. He ran it over Harry's arm and the wound knit itself up and vanished without a trace. He held out his hand, and Harry remembered to return the silver knife.

"Well?" Petri asked.

Harry stared at him, confused for a moment, before he broke out into a grin. "I did it," he said.

"Congratulations," Petri said. "You've learned to restore life. Now you need to apply it to larger, smarter animals."

Harry's face fell at the thought of repeating the ordeal with the spider. Petri laughed.

"It won't be nearly as hard as the first time. And before that, I will teach you a few other charms."


	12. Conjurer

"Series exercises," Petri called them. They were supposed to be basic charms that were the building blocks to a long sequence of useful charms, and things which all aspiring enchanters ought to be able to cast in their sleep.

Harry wasn't sure if he was serious, or if he just wanted Harry to become better at being a servant. _Reparo_ was a dead useful charm, and in a certain way was miraculous, but after breaking a teapot and then fixing it what felt like a hundred times, and then breaking a mirror and fixing that, for a thousand years' worth of bad luck (or perhaps repairing the mirror negated that), Harry was just about ready to lose his sense of wonder, forever.

Fortunately, at this point, Petri deemed him "adequate" at the basic mending charm and started him on the severing charm, so that he could make more interesting things to mend. The severing charm had the added bonus of also being a basic spell series.

Lately, Petri had begun re-establishing his "special" business, and spent less time directly overseeing Harry, so Rosenkol was tasked with making sure that Harry did his series exercises correctly. He was rather too fond of demonstrations, in Harry's opinion.

"Are you sure you're doing that right?" Harry asked, a little nervous to have Rosenkol waving his wand around. The elf tended to make surprisingly violent movements with it, slashes where he expected swishes. Harry was sure that those were different. Still, the severing charm did what it was supposed to do, neatly cleaving a piece of parchment in two without damaging the kitchen table underneath.

"Elves are not using of wizard movements," said Rosenkol. Clearly, he didn't use wizard incantations either, which left it to the imagination how his brand of magic had anything to do with what Harry was trying to learn.

Rosenkol handed the wand back to Harry, who tapped the parchment. " _Reparo,_ " he said firmly, imaging the pieces fusing together. The parchment fluttered a little, came together, and then promptly fell apart again.

"What?" Harry demanded, disappointed. He was sure that he had mastered the spell after using it so many times. It hadn't felt any different.

"Parchment is not wanting to mend, it is wanting to be severed from severing charm," Rosenkol said. "Wizardling is needing greater will."

Harry frowned. So it was more difficult to do magic on something that had already been changed another way with magic. He pointed his wand at the parchment and said, " _Finite. Reparo_." The halves cleaved together, good as new. He grinned.

"That is cheating," Rosenkol grumbled. Harry ignored him.

He tried cutting the paper with the severing charm again, but nothing happened. "I'm saying it right, right? _Diffindo,_ " he said, but it still failed to have an effect. He was getting used to the irritating process of learning spells, but that did not mean he liked it. There didn't seem to be a much better option than trial and error. According to Petri, the incantation and wand movement were a matter of technique but in the end it was the wizard who did the magic, and that was something everyone had to master for himself.

"Wizardling requires more will," Rosenkol said unhelpfully. Harry was still not clear what "will" was supposed to mean, in a literal sense. Concentrating harder did not seem to make a difference.

He took a breath, and tried to be more confident. It was going to work.

" _Diffindo!_ "

The paper tore, though rather haphazardly. It was something. With renewed determination, he managed to improve his mending charm and make his severing charm follow his intention more precisely, but after his charmwork began looking reasonably good, his attention started wandering.

"I'm bored," Harry said, after a dozen functional _diffindo_ and _reparo_ pairs. "Can I learn something new?"

"Wizardling is needing to master the basics," Rosenkol said.

"But I'm bored," Harry insisted. Rosenkol rubbed at one of his large, flappy ears, clearly thinking.

"Wizardling may take a break," he finally said. Harry grinned, and then his grin faded as he tried to think of something to do, and came up short.

When the Dursleys had locked him in the cupboard, he would play with the broken toy soldiers he had salvaged when Dudley had thrown them out years ago. They all had names and they belonged to the kingdoms of Potterland and Dudland, which were always at war. Potterland always won, of course, but not without ample opportunity for their King-General Harrius to engage in heroic exploits with his best mate, Tiberius. It had been almost a year since he'd been with them, though, and after having learned real magic, playing pretend with toys seemed too childish. He also wasn't sure how Petri would react if he asked for a toy. Petri might just give him one – the enchanter's shop had stocked magical toys, and Harry thought that the flying dragon figures which zoomed around and breathed small gouts of flame were pretty wicked – but he also might just laugh in Harry's face, which would be embarrassing.

Harry looked speculatively at Rosenkol. Figuring that there was nothing to lose on this front, at least, he asked "Will you play with me?"

"What is Wizardling wanting to play?" Rosenkol asked, to Harry's delight. It was a much better response than he had let himself hope for.

"Well, I don't really know any games. Do you?" he asked. Rosenkol shook his head, pulling at his ears.

"House elves be working, not playing," he said. Given that Rosenkol couldn't really cook and barely did any cleaning, Harry was a little sceptical. What exactly did Rosenkol think "work" meant?

"What are you doing when you aren't working, though?" Harry pressed. Rosenkol looked reluctant, but he did answer.

"Rosenkol is practising magic, just like Wizardling," he said.

"Okay, so what about when you are working? What kind of work do you do?" Harry asked.

"Rosenkol is teaching Wizardling, and gathering materials," Rosenkol said. Harry's mind flashed to dead bodies. Right. How could he have forgotten? "But Master Joachim is not needing many materials now."

Rosenkol looked a little morose, and Harry tried in vain to find something else to talk about. After a few moments, the elf brightened up on his own, however, and said, "Perhaps we can be asking Wizardling Ulrich or Wizardling Aleksandra about games?"

Harry shook his head hastily. "I don't want to bother, er, Master Joachim –" it felt exceedingly weird to refer to Petri like that, "– about this."

"Rosenkol will conjure," said the elf, and before Harry could make any other protest, Rosenkol snapped his fingers, and summoned the same mirror which Harry had practised the mending spell on from the next room. It encountered brief resistance at the door before overcoming the weight of the tent flap and zooming into the elf's outstretched hand.

Setting the mirror on the table, the elf jumped up to stand on a chair so that he could bend over the mirror and put both hands on its surface. After about a minute of intense concentration, during which Harry barely dared to breathe, Rosenkol relaxed and pulled away from the mirror.

"What's going on?"

Harry jumped at the disembodied voice, but a closer glance at the mirror showed that it was no longer reflecting the ceiling, but showed the somewhat indistinct form of an older boy. As the image sharpened, Harry saw that it was indeed Ulrich.

"Wizardling Ulrich," Rosenkol said.

"Rosenkol, is that you? You conjured me? And for the last time it's _Zauberlehrling,_ " said Ulrich.

For the first time, Harry realised that Rosenkol's name for him and the other apprentices, " _Zauberling_ ," was actually a mispronunciation of "magical apprentice," rather than a term of endearment. He felt a little stupid for thinking otherwise. It _was_ easier to say, though.

"Rosenkol conjured Wizardling Ulrich," Rosenkol began, ignoring the correction, "to advise Wizardling Harry on wizard games."

"Master Joachim got someone else, then? To replace me?" Ulrich asked a little hotly.

Harry was confused. He'd met Ulrich before, Ulrich and Aleksandra together, even, while they helped Petri with preparing materials. He peered into the mirror so that he was face-to-face with the other apprentice.

"Three people," he said, trying to explain things. "I'm his fourth apprentice. Don't you remember?"

Ulrich shook his head. "Should I? I expect Rosenkol's conjured the wrong version of me. Fourth apprentice, really? What happened to the other two then?"

"One was eaten by a dementor. I don't know what happened to the other," Harry said. He frowned, paused, and then decided to go ahead, "Actually, what happened to you, if you don't mind me asking?" He cringed a little. It seemed insensitive of him.

Ulrich seemed happy enough to answer, however. "Attacked by my own inferius. Stupid, really. Master Joachim killed me to spare me from the curse."

Harry was aghast at this story.

"Don't look so down. It was my own fault for making one behind Master Joachim's back. I thought I knew the theory but I really had no idea what I was doing. Anyway, what did you need me for? Rosenkol said something about games?" Ulrich asked.

Harry felt a little embarrassed to be talking about something as trivial and childish as games after hearing the story behind Ulrich's death, but after Rosenkol had gone to the trouble of conjuring him Harry figured he might as well ask.

"Well, er, I had some free time, and I realised that I don't know any wizard games," he said, feeling his face burning a little.

Ulrich blinked. "You don't know any games? How old are you? Were you raised in the forest?"

"Er, no, I was raised by muggles. And I'm ten," Harry said, wondering what the forest had to do with anything. He supposed they were living in a forest right now, if that mattered.

"Muggles!" Ulrich cried, looking far more horrified than Harry had felt about his death, "Ten! Is Master Joachim mad? You're not even old enough for Durmstrang yet. I thought you looked a bit young, but..."

Harry reeled at the rapid-fire way Ulrich talked. Petri usually had the thought to speak slowly for him, and he had got used to the man's speech patterns, but this was something new.

"Sorry, my German's still pretty bad," he said to Ulrich. "What's Durmstrang?"

Ulrich laughed, his expression a little strained. "It's a school. For magic. What is Master Joachim even teaching you? When I was ten, I didn't even know what _wingardium leviosa_ was."

"I know _wingardium leviosa,_ " Harry said, a little offended. "I'm working on _locomotor_ , with animals." This was a little bit of a stretch. He hadn't actually moved on to anything past the spider yet.

Ulrich frowned. "Well, that's what Master Joachim started me on… but I was sixteen. You must be some kind of prodigy," he said.

"Er, no, not really," Harry said. "I only know a couple of spells."

Ulrich looked unconvinced, but as he opened his mouth to speak again, Rosenkol interrupted.

"Wizardlings, the conjuration is fading," he said. Ulrich nodded.

"Right. Well, anyway, games. The best game ever is Gobstones. Master Joachim used to make premium Gobstones sets, and I don't see why he wouldn't still. He let me have one for my birthday. I'm sure he'd give you one too, if you asked. It's a great game that everyone should know how to play," Ulrich said, with some urgency. The edges of his form were beginning to blur.

"Er, right. Sorry, what's it called again?" Harry asked.

"Gobstones!" Ulrich said. He seemed to be shouting, but the sound was getting fainter. "It was nice meeting you!"

Before Harry could respond, the image in the mirror faded away into his own reflection. Harry felt a little awful at the thought that Ulrich had, in a certain sense, just died again.

"Is that Ulrich's voice?"

Harry turned sharply to see Petri standing in the doorway. He felt like he had just been caught doing something bad, even though he didn't think there had been any rules to break on the matter in the first place.

"Rosenkol conjured Wizardling Ulrich for Wizardling Harry," said Rosenkol. Petri nodded.

"I thought so. Gobstones. That boy is incorrigible," he said. "What did you need Ulrich for?"

Harry flushed. "I was taking a short break, but I realised I don't know any wizard games." It sounded even more stupid now that he was saying it to an adult.

Petri did not laugh, nor did he seem angry. He only stared at Harry for a few moments. "I see," he finally said. "If you would like to play Gobstones with Ulrich, I can conjure him to his body."

Now it was Harry's turn to stare. He knew that Petri conjured Ulrich and Aleksandra every so often to help him prepare his materials, but this offer seemed almost perversely frivolous.

"What's the difference," he finally asked, "between conjuring someone and bringing them back to life?"

"It's temporary," Petri said.

"Life is temporary," Harry pointed out. Petri smiled.

"The difference is, naturally, that they aren't alive," he said. "They have will, through your magic, but they do not have their own free will. In the end they are reconstructed from what magic remembers of them. Much of their true self is lost."

Harry was still unconvinced. "Isn't that better than being dead?" he asked.

"I never said it wasn't," said Petri. "Most wizards, however, would disagree with us on that score."

"Really?" asked Harry, frowning.

"A reasonably durable binding also requires multiple human sacrifices," Petri added.

"Oh," said Harry a little faintly. Of course Petri would neglect to mention that detail until halfway through the conversation. Any fleeting thoughts that had crossed Harry's mind about maybe bringing his parents half back to life were sent crashing into the abyss. That was definitely a poor bargain. "Er, never mind about Ulrich," he said.

Petri laughed. "For Ulrich, we merely need some blood," he said. "His body is uniquely suited to housing him because of the way he died."

"An inferius," Harry said without thinking. Petri raised his eyebrows.

"He told you then? Evidently the dead tell plenty of tales. Well, come along," he said, turning and leaving the kitchen. Harry hurried after him, glancing back at Rosenkol, who shook his overlarge head and stayed on the chair where he stood.

They went inside Petri's trunk, which Harry had learned was actually even bigger than the tent, perhaps just for the sake of making no sense whatsoever. Why did anybody need a house, if they could live in a trunk?

On the other side of the stone chamber with the blood-demanding door was another hidden door that led to a workroom that was essentially identical to Petri's old attic, except that there was no fireplace. Petri walked over to the cabinet next to the one full of blood vials and tapped his wand on the handle of a narrow drawer. Then he pulled the drawer out carelessly, and still there was impossibly more drawer. It extended a minimum of two metres.

It was bigger on the inside, and Harry saw Ulrich's body, partly covered by a funeral shroud but apparently perfectly preserved and looking just like it had the last time Petri had used it. The drawer was a little too narrow for the body to come out as it was, so Petri had to roll it onto its side before he heaved it out. Harry winced at how Ulrich's head lolled and struck the ground.

Petri usually used magic for every little thing, so naturally Harry asked, "What's the reason for not using magic?"

"Magic activates the inferius," he said. "I hope that you do not wish to die in the same manner as he did."

A little warier, Harry stepped back as Petri dragged the body into the centre of the room where there was more space, and positioned it so that it was face down.

"Why don't you prepare the guide paths for the binding?" Petri said. It was hardly a suggestion. He summoned a piece of parchment from the stationary drawer and waved his wand at it. A schematic appeared on it, and he handed it to Harry.

"With what?" Harry asked. He had done this once before, and watched Petri do it several times, so he knew that it needed blood.

Petri was already summoning a paint brush and vial. The brush came to a stop and clattered to the floor, but the vial he caught. It was empty.

"Your arm," he said. Harry held out his arm with some trepidation, but he needn't have feared, because Petri simply used the blood-drawing spell to direct a long strand of blood into the vial, and Harry barely felt anything beyond a faint warmth. Harry took the vial once it was half full and knelt down to pick up the brush with his other hand, which was already clutching the parchment with the template.

He put the parchment down next to Ulrich's body, stared it for a while in an attempt to memorise some of the patterns, and then began to draw with the blood.

The first time Harry had done this, he had been terrified of messing it up. However, he had learned that the brush handle was enchanted for steadiness, and so he had no trouble at all directing it to where he wanted it to go. He took special care not to let anything but the bristles touch the inferius. He didn't want to know if the magic on the brush handle counted as enough magic to wake it. At this distance, he would probably be half-eaten before Petri even had a chance to summon him out of its grasp.

Harry double-checked the pattern of lines against the template on the sheet.

"Is this the nervous system?" he asked. There were a large number of little lines all over the head, which was thankfully bald. He had to turn the head several times to reach all the parts around the eyes. The main lines extended down the spine and arms.

"It's the standard magical flow," Petri said. "It would be better if we had a sketch of Ulrich's original magical flow, but we don't, so that will have to do."

Harry glanced at the pattern again. The thick lines along the arms suddenly made more sense.

"Stand back," Petri said, and Harry scrambled to do so. Petri raised both hands and held them there for a few seconds, concentrating intently.

Then he slashed his wand downward and said, " _Spiritus_." A fine mist began to coalesce around the tip of his wand. He spoke the incantation repeatedly like a mantra, twirling the wand steadily in a complicated formation. The mist darkened and expanded, soon beginning to take a distinctly humanoid form. The edges grew more defined, and Ulrich's features sharpened.

Abruptly Petri swept his wand arm out, slamming the ghostly Ulrich into his inferius body. The body lurched, flipping around and getting to its feet in with threatening alacrity, but then it seemed to wilt as awareness took hold. Petri summoned robes from one of the corner cabinets and then banished them toward Ulrich, who caught them more by virtue of being in the way than anything else.

Slowly, he removed the fabric from where it had flopped onto his face and shook it out to find the sleeves. He dressed himself, and then looked around the workshop.

"Harry, Master," he greeted softly. "What happened to the floo?"

"We are inside my trunk. Harry will answer your other questions," Petri said. "You've been summoned to teach him your favourite game. Your possessions remain in your bag."

Ulrich blinked in obvious incomprehension. "Sorry, Master, but you mean Gobstones?"

"Yes, Gobstones," Petri said with some irritation.

"Right, right," Ulrich said quickly, clearly familiar with Petri's dislike for repeating himself. "Er, Harry?"

"Oh, hello. Right, er, where's your, erm, bag?" Harry asked, walking slowly toward the door. Thankfully, Ulrich followed him, sparing him from awkwardly standing in the middle of the room. Harry glanced back at Petri, but he had already turned away from them and was writing something on a piece of parchment, so Harry took it as leave to do whatever he wanted.

"This door goes to the hexagon room right?" Ulrich asked. Harry nodded. They passed through the illusion of solid stone, and Ulrich gestured to the large table in the centre. "It's a level down."

"A level down?" Harry repeated.

"Tap your wand… there, I think," Ulrich said, pointing to one of the carved faces which to Harry looked indistinguishable from the others. Or rather, they were all different, and there didn't seem to be anything special about this one. He took Ulrich's word for it and tapped it.

With a grinding sound, the stone shifted, beginning to sink, and Ulrich jumped to stand on the slab. Harry followed him quickly, realising that the table had become a lift of sorts.

Of course the bloody trunk was still even bigger than Harry had thought.

The room underneath the hexagon room was, against all logic, shaped like a pentagon. It was some kind of library, if the book-laden shelves on all sides were any indication. There were some armchairs positioned around the platform, which was evidently meant to serve as a table here as well, and smaller desks equipped with empty glass jars. Harry hazarded a guess that they were meant to hold bluebell flames.

"It should be in one of these drawers," said Ulrich, having jumped down from the platform. Harry joined him and was astonished to see that the face carvings had been replaced by regular drawers, which Ulrich was presently going through. "Aha!" He produced a drawstring bag, tugged it open, and peered inside.

When he reached in, his arm disappeared up to the shoulder, telling Harry that another extension charm was in play here.

Out of the bag came another bag. "You okay playing here?" he asked.

"Sure," said Harry. "But, er, how long does the conjuration last?" He didn't fancy getting mauled by an inferius when Ulrich's spirit departed again. Ulrich glanced down at his hands. The bloody paths remained unnaturally crisp and fresh, a stark contrast to the greyish corpse tone of the rest of the body.

"This is your blood, right? It should last as long as you stay awake," he said. "Don't worry about it."

Ulrich opened the second bag and tipped it upside down. A collection of large, multi-coloured marbles tumbled out, but they fell straight and did not roll. Harry realised that they were hovering very slightly above the table. Ulrich gave the bag another shake, and bright red feather quill landed on top of the marbles. He grabbed the quill, climbed up on the table, and set it, point-down, in the middle, giving it a little prod. It began to move on its own, flying out to draw several large, concentric circles.

"Okay. The rules are pretty simple. One person plays green and the other red. The Gobstones go in the middle, like so." Ulrich removed one green and one red stone from the rest, and then used his arm to sweep the others toward the centre. They moved reluctantly at first, but then arranged themselves into a circle, orbiting languidly.

"Each of us has a shooter. You want to use it to knock the other person's stones out of the ring, and squirt them with Gobwater. You keep shooting from where your shooter landed until you miss, and then it's the other person's turn," Ulrich said.

Harry was still rather confused, but obligingly climbed up onto the platform to join him. Ulrich handed him the green Gobstone.

"Let's try playing," he said, backing up to stand at the opposite edge of the platform. He knelt down, and then his hand shot out, sending his Gobstone hurtling toward the centre. Harry's Gobstones came to life and tried to dodge it, but their haphazard milling about just put them in the shooter's way, and it struck true, sending a green Gobstone flying out of the ring. The green stone vibrated ominously for a moment, and then Harry was coughing and sputtering from a blast of some disgusting, slimy liquid that had hit him square in the face.

Wiping his eyes with his sleeve, he glared at the offending Gobstone.

"Don't worry, the Gobwater will vanish itself pretty soon. You can use your magic – wandless only, mind you – to control your stones and dodge, and your opponent is supposed to control the shooter as well, but obviously I can't use magic because I'm dead. I'm very good at this game though, so we'll call it a handicap."

Harry nodded, reeling a little from the unexpected encounter with the "Gobwater" and Ulrich's rapid speech. Something had been bothering him the entire time since the conjuration. Until earlier today, he had never heard more than a few words out of the first apprentice's mouth, and Ulrich's spirit had always seemed dull and depressed, and frankly nothing like the lively personality he showed now.

"Something wrong?" asked Ulrich. Harry realised that he had been silent and still for a little too long. He shook his head.

"No. It's just… you're very different from the last time, er, Master Joachim conjured you," he said.

Ulrich laughed. "What can I say? Master Joachim hates my fun side. He usually leaves it out." He shrugged, as if it was hardly a big deal that Petri picked and chose from his personality.

Harry supposed that it was still better than being permanently dead.

Ulrich took his silence as the end of the conversation, and used the opportunity to strike another one of Harry's Gobstones out of the ring. Harry tried to jump to the side, but the Gobwater struck him unerringly anyway, and he thought uncharitably that he wasn't sure if he liked Ulrich's "fun side" much, either.

He concentrated more on the game, trying to use "wandless magic" to move his Gobstones out of the way. He was not convinced that anything was actually happening, because the stones still seemed to be rolling around randomly, and Ulrich was taking them out at an alarming rate. If the Gobwater hadn't been vanishing within seconds, Harry would be soaked in the foul-smelling liquid.

After seven consecutive strikes, Ulrich finally missed catastrophically and hit one of his own Gobstones when the green Gobstone he had been aiming for rolled cleverly behind a red one. Apparently angered, the red Gobstone and his shooter each squirted a generous blast of Gobwater at him.

Harry had to admit that it was pretty funny when it was someone else on the receiving end.

Seeing that it was his turn, he knelt and set his shooter down. It hovered stubbornly at a fixed level, and the overall effect was like pressing it against a sheet of smooth glass. Having no particular idea of what he was doing, Harry launched his shooter toward the centre ring, focusing on a cluster that was noticeably more red than green.

The red Gobstones scattered, and the shooter made an attempt to follow them, but rolled past. Harry glared it. Just a little more…

To his surprise, it swerved slightly, clearly breaking its natural trajectory, and slammed into a wayward red stone, which rolled out of the ring and squirted Ulrich.

"Good job," said Ulrich, giving him a thumbs up.

It was obvious that Harry was outclassed, however, as he missed his next shot somehow from point-blank range, and was then crushed by Ulrich on the very next turn.

"Well, maybe I should go easier on you," Ulrich said, looking a little sheepish. A little frustrated, Harry shook his head.

"No, don't," he said. "I'll figure it out."

They played another game. Ulrich let Harry go first, but still won in two turns. On the third game, Harry finally figured out how to make his Gobstones move slightly out of the way to dodge Ulrich, and so managed to survive a little longer, but his own aim for moving targets was still poor.

"Let's take a break," Harry said, realising as he said it that taking a break from his break seemed a little silly. "I mean, I'll practise more magic for a bit."

"Sure. We can do whatever you want," Ulrich said equitably. He held the Gobstones pouch open expectantly, and the stones rolled toward it, scrambling to get inside. The red quill followed. As soon as it returned to the bag, the circles it had drawn faded.

Harry jumped off the table and looked around for something that he could practise severing and mending. Not wanting to resort to damaging books which might be important, he tried some of the drawers. They seemed to contain various enchanted objects. Harry even found one full of remembralls of different sizes.

"What are you looking for?" asked Ulrich.

"Something I can practise _diffindo_ and _reparo_ on," Harry said.

"You can practise on me," Ulrich said.

"What?" Harry said in incomprehension. There were far too many problematic things about that statement.

"My body is an inferius," Ulrich said. "You can't permanently stop inferi except with fire, but they aren't actually magic resistant. It's completely safe"

"It won't hurt?" Harry asked, still rather uneasy about the prospect.

"Pain is for the living," Ulrich said.

Not entirely reassured, Harry nonetheless pointed his wand at Ulrich and slashed downward, incanting, " _Diffindo!_ "

Nothing appeared to happen at all, and he frowned.

"Try cutting off my arm," Ulrich said. Harry baulked.

"What?" he blurted.

"Well it's the severing charm," Ulrich said, "so it doesn't work if you aren't intending to cut through something specific."

That made sense, Harry supposed, but it still did not make the idea more appealing. Ulrich held out his arm to the side and rolled up the sleeve.

Swallowing pre-emptively to suppress his disgust, Harry imagined the arm coming apart at the elbow and said, " _Diffindo!_ "

To his horror, it actually worked, and the forearm came clean off. Ulrich did not react, so apparently it really did not hurt. Harry stared at the arm on the ground, where it was rocking back and forth, apparently trying to turn itself over. There was no blood, but instead a thick, clear liquid was seeping out slowly.

"Shite!" said Ulrich, bending down and picking up his arm with his other hand. He pressed it up against the stump. "I forgot about the preservation potion. You should probably mend this before any more comes out."

"Er, right," said Harry, raising his wand again. " _Reparo!_ "

"Hm," Ulrich muttered. The spell did not seem to have worked. "Try _inferius reparo_ ," he said.

Harry tried the target-specific incantation and was relieved to see the arm reattach without incident.

"Let's not do that again," Harry said, after a beat. Ulrich laughed, looking a little strained.

"Agreed. So maybe it was a bad idea," he said.

"Would something like that work on a real – I mean, a live person?" Harry asked.

"Your severing charm would probably need to be much, much stronger to beat someone's will to keep their limbs," Ulrich said. "And I don't think _reparo_ works on people. Maybe if you mastered the whole series, and you were Albus Dumbledore, or something."

"Albus Dumbledore?" Harry asked. It sounded like a name.

"The most powerful wizard alive. At least, I think he's still alive," Ulrich said.

"How do we know he's the most powerful?" Harry asked.

Ulrich frowned. "You know, I never thought about it. He defeated Grindelwald singlehandedly, when no one else could, so I guess everyone assumed."

"Grindelwald?"

"You don't know about Grindelwald?" asked Ulrich incredulously. "He was a dark wizard, like us, and people used to say that _he_ was the most powerful wizard alive. He tried conquering Europe, but Dumbledore stopped him. Anyway, I'm surprised you haven't heard of him. He made a lot of advances in necromancy. I swear every other thing is named after him."

Harry was a little overwhelmed by the way Ulrich seemed to jump from topic to topic, and his grasp of context was beginning to fail him. He certainly caught the bit about necromancy, however.

"Like what things?" he asked, eager for knowledge. Petri was frustratingly vague with information about the "Other," only ever seeming to teach him techniques. Harry did tend to be a more practical-minded person, and he would be glad to learn a little less charm theory and more charms, but he felt like he had no real idea what necromancy even was, beyond the obvious.

"Well, there's Grindelwald's process for inferi seeding. He was the first one who made a whole army of them that obeyed him. Before him, people thought that it was only possible to control one at a time," Ulrich said.

Harry nodded, remembering the inferi seed that Petri had made once.

"There's also the Grindelwald Conjuration, to conjure an extremely destructive spirit instead of the usual. I don't really know how it works," Ulrich said. "I only just started basic spirit conjurations before I died."

"How long did you spend on enchantment?" Harry asked.

"A year and a half," Ulrich said. "I expect you won't be able to learn more than the basics for now. The charmwork gets pretty advanced pretty quickly. Is Master Joachim paying for your schooling?"

"I don't know," said Harry, shrugging. The first he had heard about an organised school for magic was from Ulrich. He had previously been under the impression that everybody got apprenticeships when they were ten or eleven. Maybe Petri intended to keep teaching him without sending him to school at all. Harry wasn't even sure which option was better, but Ulrich made it sound like going to Durmstrang was the expected thing to do.

"He paid for my last two years, when my father—well, anyway, he has the money. Don't let him convince you otherwise," Ulrich said. Harry nodded. The money was hardly the problem; it was Petri's willingness to spend any of it that was in question.

"You knew him before being his apprentice, then?" Harry asked. "I mean, uh, how did you meet him?"

Ulrich looked very uncomfortable, and Harry was about to take the question back, when he answered, almost monotonously. "Master Joachim was a friend of my father's. He took me in after my father died and the Lady threw me out."

"The Lady?" Harry asked, unable to contain his curiosity despite his awareness that Ulrich did not want to talk about this subject.

"My father's wife," Ulrich said. He clamped his mouth shut. Harry felt a little bad.

"Sorry," he said weakly.

"Don't be," said Ulrich, regaining some of his cheer. "I'm here to serve you."

"What do you mean?" Harry asked, finding the statement odd.

"Oh right, you haven't studied conjuration yet. The point of conjuring spirits is so they do what you want. I mean, also, it's impossible to do otherwise. You can't make real free will," Ulrich said.

Harry saw the connection quickly, in the way Ulrich was so ready to answer his questions, and did not like it. "You mean you have to do whatever I say? And I couldn't actually bring you back to life?"

"Exactly," said Ulrich. "Well, there is kind of a way to bring someone back to life. I mean, it's a special situation and they had to have done this thing before they died. It's pretty awful actually…"

Harry's hope got ahead of him for a moment, and the fantasy of resurrection played out fully in his mind's eye, but then he got the horrible sense that he knew what Ulrich was talking about.

"A horcrux," Harry said, hoping he wasn't entirely off the mark.

"You know?" Ulrich asked, a little astonished.

"I made one," Harry said, after a pause. He figured relating this information to somebody who was already dead was probably fine. The utterly flabbergasted look on Ulrich's face was not what he expected, however.

"You're not joking," Ulrich finally said. "You're ten. How are you still sane? Are you—I mean, you _seem_ pretty sane."

"What are you talking about?" Harry asked, frowning. "Does it drive you mad?"

"I don't know. You tell me," Ulrich said rather breathlessly. "You actually did the ritual."

"That's the thing," Harry said. "Master Joachim did it for me."

Ulrich shook his head slowly. "That's impossible," he said. "Someone else can't—"

"That's quite enough." It was Petri's voice, from above.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's always bothered me that you can make paintings that talk, apparently have enough consciousness to spy on people and have their own loyalties, and in general function as a 2D facsimile of their original selves. The headmasters have to teach their paintings to act like them, but that's just knowledge and mannerisms - the consciousness and intelligence come from elsewhere. You can't bring the dead back but it seems that you can make a pretty damn good copy.


	13. Half-Blood

The walk back to the work room was tense. Nobody said anything, though Harry glanced over to Ulrich every so often. The older boy's expression was almost terrifyingly blank.

Without much prompting beyond a nod of Petri's head, Ulrich disrobed and climbed back into his drawer. As soon as he lay down, he seemed to slump into unconsciousness, and the guide paths on his skin dissolved. Harry flinched as Petri shoved the drawer shut.

Harry had the overwhelming urge to demand answers from Petri, but was conscious enough of the absurdity of such an act that he managed to restrain himself. If Petri had stopped Ulrich from telling him, there was no way he would explain it himself.

"Did you have fun?" Petri asked. He sounded dangerously normal, even though Harry would have expected it to be a leading question. It probably was.

"Yes," he said, stubbornly, even though he was not certain that the experience qualified as "fun," in any sense. Gobstones had been a curiosity at best, and the following conversation informative, but disturbing.

"Good," said Petri. After staring at Harry piercingly for a long moment, he turned away. Harry breathed out a quiet sigh. He supposed they were just going to pretend the horcrux matter had never come up.

Petri walked up to the worktable and summoned a stack of parchment from a drawer. A sweep of his wand distributed the sheets across the table, and he cast a severing charm at each one.

"Show me your mending charm," he said. "Start here."

Harry directed his wand where Petri pointed, and incanted, _"Reparo_." The two halves cleaved together seamlessly. He moved on to the next page, wondering what the point was in repeating the exercise.

He soon found out, as the repair job was less smooth on the third parchment, and required another try. Petri made no comment, but Harry felt very self-conscious as he cast the spell a second time. He had gathered that Petri had used a stronger severing charm with each successive parchment.

By the fifth parchment, he could hardly get the halves to do more than align themselves. They seemed to refuse to stick together. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and he felt a little hot from embarrassment.

"Don't force it," said Petri. He did not look disapproving, which Harry supposed was good. "You'll make further progress in time. For now, read the next two chapters in the _Standard Book_ and chapter two in _Gesang und Rhythmus_."

Reading. Joy. Still, Harry was glad to get out of Petri's presence for now. He wasn't sure how much longer he could go without asking a potentially unfortunate question.

Then he remembered the blood door. "How do I get out, sir?" he asked. There was no way he was going to cut himself without some way to heal it.

Petri waved dismissively. "Go down to the library. It should have a copy of both books," he said. By "library," Harry assumed that Petri meant the pentagonal room with the books and the armchairs.

It took several tries for Harry to find the right face carving to activate the lift, but he fortunately managed without having to go back to ask Petri. Finding the books that he wanted was another matter. They were organised by the last name of the author, and while he had seen the _Standard Book of Spells_ enough times to remember that it was by Miranda Goshawk, he had no idea who had written the other book, which he had only just read the first chapter of, and with only a rather limited understanding. It was written in German, and Harry had the impression that it was meant for adults.

He found the _Standard Book_ quickly enough, and along with it an entire row of smaller textbooks by the same title, but with "Grade One," "Grade Two," and such appended. He supposed that they were for school. Curious, he took down the grade one book and the full book and sat down on one of the armchairs to compare them.

The first thing he noticed was that the spells and chapters were organised differently, with the grade one book skipping a number of charms to make room for others. The school textbook also had more detailed animated diagrams of each wand movement, and less information about the spell itself. The main book often gave examples of applications, though it was nowhere near as detailed as the _Complete Compendium of Charms_. Instead, as the introduction intimated, the _Standard Book_ had the aim of adequately covering the spells most useful for a wizard's education.

Harry was on chapter six at the moment, and as far as he could tell, he had read more pages than the entirety of the first two grades of the textbook combined, but had not yet covered all the spells from grade one. He wasn't sure if that was good or bad. On the one hand, he wanted to learn magic, but on the other hand, a good foundation could be more important than knowing a lot of spells.

Setting the grade one book aside, he flipped to where he remembered having left off in the main book and settled down to read about the dancing-feet spell. The spell itself was pretty useless, according to Goshawk, and only usually taught because it was an excellent measure of focus, something which was difficult to disentangle from power and will in other spells. Improper focus caused the spell to have unpredictable results. A poorly-cast instance of it was even said to be responsible for one of worst volcanic eruptions in Europe!

Of course, the book recommended aspiring students practise on dolls and fruits, and advised against casting it on rigid objects with legs like tables and chairs, or on other people.

Harry wondered why fruit was such a common target. He had also practised the variants of _locomotor_ on a basket of apples. Upon further reading, he found that even the goal of the exercise was the same – to make the fruit walk across a table. Of course, unlike with the animation charm, where he had struggled to make it move at all, the trick with the dancing-feet spell was to keep the fruit from leaping uncontrollably off the edge.

The next chapter was an introduction to the fire-making spell. The reader was cautioned not to attempt the spell without taking precautions, or before mastering the focus exercises in the previous chapter. Harry resigned himself to hours of dancing fruits in his future.

Skimming the remainder of the chapter, which talked about bluebell flames, a subject which Harry already knew more than enough about after reading the entry in the _Complete Compendium_ , he shut the book and returned it and its grade one edition to their place.

Now for _Gesang und Rhythmus_ , which Harry was pretty sure did not actually mean "Song and Rhythm," though he had no better guesses and he didn't know how to make the dictionary spell give alternative definitions.

First, he needed to find the book. He wished he knew the summoning charm, or at least some kind of search spell.

Rumbling from behind him drew his attention, and he saw that the platform in the centre of the room was beginning to rise. Panicking slightly, he ran up to it and leapt, only just managing to roll himself onto the surface. When the platform finished its ascent, Harry was met with Petri's unimpressed scowl.

"Did you finish your reading?" Petri asked.

"Only the _Standard Book,_ " said Harry. "I saw that it's divided into grades. Is that for school?"

"Yes, exactly," said Petri.

"Will I go to school?" Harry asked, a little nervous. He wasn't sure what answer he wanted to hear.

"Of course," said Petri. He motioned for Harry to follow him, and led the way out of the trunk. Harry guessed that it was about dinner time. "You'll go to school starting next year, for seven years, and then return to finish your apprenticeship in just two years. Normally it would be four, but you will have had a head start."

"Oh," said Harry. That was more detail than Harry had been expecting, and sounded legitimate, if a little too fully-planned. What if he developed an interest in something else and didn't want to finish his apprenticeship? Harry supposed that he had no idea what that something else might be, and that it would be foolish to ask such a question.

Instead, he said, "That's a long time. Why did you pick me to be your apprentice? Why not someone who was done with school?"

"You were living with muggles," said Petri very pointedly, as if that explained everything. Perhaps it did. For the first time, Harry considered that perhaps from Petri's point of view, he had been doing Harry a great favour in removing him from the Dursleys and teaching him magic. Harry didn't know what to think. He'd had the opportunity and been made to do all kinds of things he would never have imagined, both amazing and awful. It was a thousand times more exciting than the humdrum routine of suburban existence, and Harry did not miss the cupboard under the stairs or Harry Hunting. He could even say he was glad to have seen the last of Aunt Petunia's pinched, horse-like visage and Uncle Vernon's moustachioed sneer.

It was just different, he concluded, and a more extreme way of living. In Little Whinging, nothing particularly good had ever happened to him, but nothing particularly bad had happened either. Under the tutelage of Petri he had learned to do real spells already, and seen even more incredible magic daily, but he had also been cursed and had to make a horcrux and deal in other obviously unsavoury magical things.

"My former master also took me in as a child," Petri said as they resurfaced into his office. Harry tucked his elbows in to fit through the trunk opening and tumbled onto the floor inelegantly. He got to his feet and looked up, but Petri seemed to be examining something on his desk, and was not looking at him. "I used to be a mudblood."

"Used to?" Harry blurted before he could stop himself.

"I despised myself terribly," said Petri, very analytically. "I became only magic, and escaped my filthy blood and body. When I returned, I was pure."

Harry stared at Petri, bewildered. That was possibly the most cryptic thing the usually straightforward man had ever said to him. What was he to make of it?

"Thankfully, you are a half-blood," said Petri, glancing at Harry for a moment before turning back to his desk. Harry followed his gaze and landed on a tiny glass orb. It looked like a Remembrall, except the smoke inside was black and churned restlessly within its confines.

"Why does blood matter?" Harry asked, genuinely curious. He had thought before that Petri simply hated muggles and thought himself superior out of arrogance, but now it seemed that there was something more to the matter.

"Mudbloods are only the barest step up from squibs," Petri said. "Their magical flow is limited and they are weak as a rule. Half-bloods are already much less likely to suffer this weakness."

Harry nodded slowly. He supposed that that made sense, though he still was not entirely satisfied with the explanation. What did it matter if mudbloods were weak, if they could still do magic? That seemed a lot better than being incapable of it at all. And was Petri right about half-bloods? Harry wondered about his own magic. Was he weak or strong? He felt uncomfortable voicing any of these questions.

Petri seemed finished with this conversation, and had already turned to leave. Harry followed him down the hall and, to his surprise, not into the kitchen but out the front tent flap and into the forest clearing where they had made their camp. It was dusk. A vague purple glow was still visible over the horizon, but the forest just a few meters away was impenetrably murky.

"We will be apparating to see a client," Petri said.

"We?" Harry repeated. Though Petri had been visiting clients regularly over the past week to take orders and made deliveries, Harry had not been a part of that so far.

"It will be in England, near where you used to live, and a convenient chance to adjust the _fidelius_ charm. Nobody must recognise you," Petri said.

"You mean people could still find out who I am, after the charm?" Harry asked a little incredulously. "Isn't it supposed to be unbeatable?"

"In theory, yes. But identity semantics are vague. Don't worry about it," said Petri. Harry wasn't worried. He didn't truly believe that it mattered whether his identity was a secret; only Petri's paranoid fixation on the matter evinced otherwise.

Petri held out his arm, and Harry grasped it tightly. He squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep breath. A moment later, he was compressed on all sides, as if being sucked through a far-too-narrow tube, and he stumbled into reality again on the other side, clutching his chest queasily. With no warning, they apparated again, and Harry felt like he was suffocating. After what seemed and interminable bout of compression, they emerged and Harry gasped heavily, his heartbeat thudding in his ears.

"One more," Petri said, sounding a little breathless, and Harry braced himself again. The last apparition was marginally better than the first two, if only because it was shorter.

They appeared on a very familiar suburban street. Bright electric lamplight illuminated the narrow pavement. At intervals, short, blocky driveways led up to wide houses in a variety of pastel colours, a step up in affluence from the bland, identically brown brick walls of Privet Drive. They were standing in front of a pale blue house on Wisteria Walk, just shy of the white pillars supporting the porch roof. A large, white cat reclined on a section of railing and stared at them with its lamp-like yellow eyes. This was Mrs. Figg's house!

Petri was already heading purposefully up the walkway toward the front door. Harry followed hesitantly after him. They were supposedly visiting a client, and that client seemed to be Mrs. Figg, the batty old cat lady who minded him whenever the Dursleys had family trips. How could Petri know her? Was she secretly a witch?

Before they even made it to the door, it swung open and revealed Mrs. Figg in only a baggy floral nightdress and slippers. A pair of cats were weaving about her skinny ankles, and another was visible behind her.

"Joachim!" she greeted. "Right on time—Harry?" She peered at Harry with wide eyes, as if she had seen a ghost, and Harry glanced at Petri with some trepidation. The man did not seem fazed by her recognition.

"Hello, Arabella" he said. "This is my apprentice, Harry. I don't believe you've met before."

Mrs. Figg craned her head forward even more to study Harry, and her lips curved into a halfhearted smile that did not manage to reach her eyes. "Oh, yes. It's nice to meet you, young man," she said. "You know, for a moment there I thought you were someone else. There was a boy living around here who looks a lot like you. Even had the same name."

Harry was a little stunned by this comment. "What a coincidence," he managed faintly. "It's nice to meet you too, Mrs., er…" he paused, remembering on time that he was not supposed to know her name.

"Figg," she offered.

"Mrs. Figg," Harry repeated.

"Come inside," said Mrs. Figg. She nudged several cats out of their path with her fluffy slippers. The slippers had button eyes and triangle ears sewn onto them, and the buttons seemed to shift ever-so-slightly to watch them as they moved. Harry wondered how he'd never noticed that detail before.

"Have a seat. You must be tired coming all this way. Would you like some tea?" said Mrs. Figg. She ushered them into the parlour and seated them on the too-squishy floral couches. Harry winced as a collection of multi-coloured cat hairs immediately adhered to his black robes.

"Tea would be lovely, though it was not such a long way; we apparated," said Petri. "How are you and your cats?"

"Oh yes, well, that's why I sent for you. It's Mr. Tibbles. Well, I'll tell you all about it over tea," said Mrs. Figg, disappearing into the kitchen.

"How do you know her?" Harry whispered in German. "She used to babysit me. Is she a witch?"

Petri glanced at the kitchen door and then said, "She's a squib. Her brother and I were comrades."

Were? Given the situation, Harry had to assume that he was dead.

Mrs. Figg came back shortly, more quickly than Harry would have expected, with a china tea set. When she put it down on the low table, the teapot wiggled, and then floated in the air to pour the tea on its own. Harry stared at the obviously magical object. He'd seen that tea set before, and it had never moved on its own like that.

There was cake too, on little plates. It was the same chocolate cake she used to feed him when he came over. Harry cautiously tried a bite, and found it less stale than usual. He sipped at the magically poured tea. It was weak, only a faintly bitter water; some things did not change.

"Mr. Tibbles is ill," said Mrs. Figg, her wrinkles deepening as she frowned into her tea. "He won't eat, and his fur's falling out. I've taken him to the muggle vet and they told me they can't do a thing. He's got weeks, months at best."

"I'm no healer," said Petri, more gently than Harry would have expected from him.

"You can help him, like you did with Tufty," said Mrs. Figg with surprising forcefulness. A dark tabby with a broad face and a misplaced tuft of fur on its head chose that moment to leap up onto the back of Mrs. Figg's armchair and wave its tail in front of her face. "He's doing so well now," she said, reaching up to run her hand along the outstretched tail.

"I'm glad," said Petri.

"So help Mr. Tibbles, too," said Mrs. Figg. "He was Octavian's. I don't want to lose him."

"Octavian's?" Petri repeated, clearly incredulous. He put his cup down on the table and leaned forward. Mrs. Figg was nodding.

"He was only a kitten back then, but still the cleverest thing. Did you know he made it all the way across the channel on his own? Stowed away on the ferry, to come back home. After—well, you know. Mr. Tibbles was how we found out Octavian wasn't coming back," she said.

"It's been almost fifty years," Petri said. "Don't you think he deserves to rest?"

Fifty years? Harry could scarcely believe his ears. The chocolate cake turned bitter in his mouth, and he swallowed thickly. He hadn't thought Petri was much older than that, but the implication that the _cat_ , that Mr. Tibbles was fifty years old was just mind-boggling. Harry had been sure that cats only lived into their teens, maybe twenty years at maximum. Magic was the only explanation, but Mrs. Figg was supposed to be a squib, according to Petri.

She was asking Petri for help now, though, so perhaps she had had help from other wizards before, as well.

"He's very happy," said Mrs. Figg. "If only he weren't ill he could live fifty more."

Petri snorted, a little unkindly.

"All right, fine, that was perhaps a tad generous," Mrs. Figg allowed, but the stubborn frown had not left her face.

"Very well. I'll help him," said Petri, with surprising alacrity given his previous reluctance. "I have to take him with me, though, you understand. I'll bring him back in a few days."

"Thank you," said Mrs. Figg, and Harry was a little shocked, despite it all, to see her tearing up. "I'm grateful, Joachim, really. You have a kind heart."

Harry could not help frowning a little at this obvious mistake. Mrs. Figg was more perceptive than she let on, however, because she glanced to him briefly.

"Harry, dear, don't let him fool you," she said, drying her eyes on the sleeve of her nightgown. "He's a good man." She turned back to Petri. "You're just like he used to be. So prickly, but you're still helping out an old squib like me."

"Hardly old," Petri interjected, as if that was the main thing he had to object to.

"Please." Mrs. Figg scoffed. "And before you get started on me again, I have a payment for you too. I hope you like it."

"Payment?" asked Petri. Harry wondered what a squib would possibly have for a wizard like Petri.

Mrs. Figg was already getting to her feet. Her joints creaked as she stood, but there was still an air of spryness about her, and she shuffled toward the kitchen again. "Come on," she said, looking back at them, and Petri stood. Harry followed, uncertain but also unwilling to be left by himself, with only Mrs. Figg's cats for company. He'd had a lifetime's worth of looking at them already.

The kitchen looked the same as ever. Unfamiliar eyes would be immediately drawn to dark green drapes that seemed incongruously heavy given the light, modern furniture that populated the rest of the room. It wasn't nearly clean enough to meet Aunt Petunia's obsessive standards—there were grease stains here and there, and the towels hanging from the oven handle didn't match—but it was tidy nonetheless. Mrs. Figg made a beeline for the drawer in the counter by the cooker, and after a moment of rummaging around produced a large, reddish-orange feather.

"Is that what I think it is?" asked Petri. The familiar tinge of avarice had crept into his voice, but Harry had no guesses for why a somewhat rumpled bird feather would be of interest to the man, except that there was definitely something magical about it. Harry found his attention unduly fixed on it, and there was a sort of ambivalent, churning feeling in his gut, like he was hungry, but also queasy.

"It is, if you're thinking that this is a feather from Albus's familiar," said Mrs. Figg very smugly.

Petri extended his hand in a "give-that-here" gesture, and Mrs. Figg planted the base of the feather into his grasp. He brought it close and inspected it carefully, running his fingers over both sides. He looked rather tense, but also pleased.

"How long have you had this? It looks fresh," he said.

"Not more than week," said Mrs. Figg. Petri nodded, apparently satisfied.

"It's not a tail feather," he said, despite that.

"Oh, shush you," said Mrs. Figg. "I'd like to see you get within ten feet of Albus."

Petri bowed his head, an amused curve at the corner of his lip. "Quite. Thank you," he said.

"You're welcome," said Mrs. Figg. "Now let's get Mr. Tibbles."

"Hold this," Petri said to Harry, and handed the apparently invaluable feather to him. Harry stared and reached out a little uncertainly, taking the feather. It was very warm, almost hot, but not enough to burn him or be uncomfortable. When he finally tore his gaze away from the thing, Petri had already scooped up the largest and whitest of the cats. Now that Harry knew the secret of Mr. Tibbles' age, he could see the signs of decrepitude clearly in the creature. Its coat looked thin and washed out, and its remarkable size only emphasised the feebleness of its comportment. It squirmed in Petri's arms, as if it would like nothing better than to get away from the man, but was too weak to realise its wishes. Harry could sympathise.

Petri jerked his head to indicate that Harry ought to precede him out the door. Petri exchanged some last pleasantries with Mrs. Figg and Harry waved awkwardly goodbye, not entirely sure that she could even see him, and then the door closed.

Petri shifted the cat onto one arm, and it renewed its attempts to get away. He held it close, however, and somehow managed to avoid its claws as he extracted his wand with his free hand. With a heavy tap, the cat began to morph, and turned into a fluffy white cushion. It still had whiskers. Harry looked on, open-mouthed.

"Is it still alive?" he blurted.

"It's fine," said Petri. He transferred the cat-turned-cushion to his wand hand and held out the right expectantly. Harry remembered that he was still holding the feather and tried to give it over.

"No, take my hand," he said. "We're apparating. And don't you dare drop that."

Harry switched hands and made sure he had a vice grip on the feather.

A dizzying, nauseating series of apparitions later, they were back in the clearing with the tent. Petri dropped the cushion unceremoniously on the ground.

" _Petrificus totalus,_ " he murmured, and with another flick of his wand and the transfiguration reversed, leaving a very stiff-looking cat. Then he took a deep breath, motioned for Harry to stand back, and jabbed with his wand, like it was a sword.

" _Avada Kedavra,_ " he cried, and there was the horrible rushing feeling and a flash of green light and the cat was relaxed, serene on the ground in death.

"You killed it," said Harry, his voice a little high-pitched. His hand hurt, and he had to shift his grip on the feather. It had suddenly grown painfully hot, but he could already feel it cooling down again. It felt almost reassuring, and he was able to take a few deep breaths to calm his indignant confusion.

"I'm no healer," Petri said, echoing his words from earlier that evening. "I am an enchanter."

He left it at that, but Harry already had a horrible idea of what was going to happen to the late Mr. Tibbles. Poor Mrs. Figg. She had been wrong, that Petri was nice, in any way. Harry knew better.

Petri turned to him and held out his hand again, and this time Harry was sure it was for the feather, so he moved to hand it over a little reluctantly. It felt right in his hand, somehow. However, when Petri touched it, he recoiled suddenly, as if burned, and Harry felt a pulse of something shoot up his arm.

"Keep that with you for now," Petri said, offering no other explanation. He did not try to take it again, but instead went inside the tent. Harry followed him in, and remembered that they hadn't had dinner yet. He wondered whether to bring it up, but decided quickly that he was not hungry, after all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Petri and Mrs. Figg are acquainted, which I hope is no surprise. Why else would Petri have been anywhere close to Harry at the start of the story without knowing about Harry?
> 
> I just want to note here that for the purposes of this story, Fantastic Beasts is considered canon. I know I'm going to eat my words when more Fantastic Beasts installments come out and contradict something I've assumed.


	14. Enchanter

Harry was unfortunately privy to the grisly business of Mr. Tibbles' revival. It was done the next morning, in the depths of the trunk.

"This is a semi-permanent reanimation," said Petri. "In order for it to last, we need to provide a constant supply of magic."

Petri opened one of the worktable drawers and withdrew an empty glass orb. "Get the Kneazle blood," he said.

Harry went to the cabinet with all the blood vials. He had no idea what "kneazle" meant; it sounded familiar, so it was probably a kind of creature, but if he had ever read about it, he couldn't remember anymore. Fortunately, the vials of creature blood were labelled and in alphabetical order since the last time he'd sorted them, so he managed to find the right one. He was thankful that Petri pronounced the "K," for otherwise he would have been stuck searching fruitlessly in the "N" section.

"Why kneazle blood?" Harry asked.

"Obviously because we are reanimating a kneazle," said Petri. Harry considered again the corpse of Mr. Tibbles with this new understanding. It made sense that Mr. Tibbles wasn't really a cat. He had been having a hard time imagining how a cat could live for fifty years, even with spells, but apparently he had been thinking about it in the wrong way entirely.

Petri used what seemed to be the reverse of the blood drawing spell to siphon the blood out of the vial and inject it into the glass orb. He then cast a spell to enlarge the orb until it was about the size of a football, and set it down on the table. The blood sloshed about inside, leaving a gritty residue on the glass.

Petri touched his wand to the top of the sphere and a globule of blood rose up to meet it. He moved his wand downward and the blood made a red stripe on the inside of the orb. The stripe was solid, and was clearly sticking there unnaturally. Petri continued to methodically make stripes, all emanating from the north pole. Soon, the free blood had been reduced to a little puddle at the bottom, and most of it was clinging to the sides in stripes.

"This is the efficient magical flow for conservation," said Petri. "You see that there are two sets of six flow lines in total," he traced them out with a finger, and Harry saw that the lines alternated between long and short.

"The open ends allow dispersal. We would close them to form a core if we wanted a vampire, but of course we do not."

Unbidden, the image of a vampire cat tried to form in Harry's mind, but however he thought about it, it turned out to look just like a regular cat. Mrs. Figg would probably notice if it started cannibalizing her other cats, though.

Petri shrunk the orb back to its original size. Then he moved to the corpse and sliced open its chest with a severing charm. The nearly bloodless wound disturbed Harry, but Petri was unfazed and simply tucked the orb somewhere into the cavity. Then he cast the mending charm and the cat was back to normal.

"Why can't you mend living things?" Harry blurted out, somewhat astonished by the easy repair of the dead cat.

"Their magical flow gets in the way," said Petri.

"What about muggles?" asked Harry.

"Even muggles have a magical flow," said Petri. "Muggles, most animals, even some plants."

He turned back to the dead cat. "Now I will use the animation charm, but with a slightly different rhythm. Pay attention."

Harry wasn't sure what Petri meant by "rhythm"—no doubt it was the same thing as the " _Rhythmus_ " from the _Gesang und Rhythmus_ book that he hadn't finished—but he watched attentively. Petri started out with a swish, twirl, and flick as usual, and the cat begin to stir. For several long moments, Petri stayed still and kept his wand fixed on its target. Then, he switched to a series of tight twirls, in what seemed to be a perfect circle, and finally gave a sharp tug, as if snapping a thread. He relaxed and let his wand fall to the side.

Mr. Tibbles shook itself and flattened its ears. It looked warily from side to side. Perfectly catlike, in Harry's opinion. He was reluctantly impressed.

"Did you see it?" asked Petri, glancing at Harry.

Harry floundered for a moment before he said, "Er, well, you added the twirls at the end."

"Yes, and why did I do that?"

"Er, to, er," Harry really had no idea. He tried to remember what each of the wand movements signified, but came up short. "To give it more power?" he guessed.

Petri snorted, and Harry concluded that he had missed the mark entirely. "The twirl is the addition of a nullity charm, which you might remember attracts external magic. It symbolises the number zero, and we repeat it six times to stabilise the enchantment, as six is the most stable number. Seven would be the most powerful, but we do not want power here."

Harry nodded. These properties of numbers seemed like superstition to him, but then again, the properties of exponents had seemed like magic to him the last time he had seen maths, so there was no telling what might be real.

Apparently, the matter with Mr. Tibbles was finished, because Petri froze the cat with _petrificus totalus_ and said, "I have a short errand to run. Practise the mending charm more until I return."

Harry bit back a groan. Detecting his reluctance nonetheless, Petri added, "We will have a lesson on enchantment once you can mend this."

He summoned a piece of parchment from the haphazard pile which had already been used for this exercise, and cast a severing charm on it, before leaving Harry to his devices. Harry wondered if it would count if he managed to cast _finite_ on the paper, but decided the next moment that it would probably be just as difficult to do that, and likely against the spirit of the exercise.

Practice had been good for something, and Harry was surprised to have managed his task after perhaps just a quarter of an hour. Satisfied, he pocketed his wand and looked around for something else to do. He was alone in Petri's workshop, and dreadfully eager to snoop, except that he was sure half the things in here could kill him. For example, Ulrich's inferius body, which Petri simply kept in that expanded drawer, would maul anybody who opened it without the right precautions. As curious as he was, he had some sense of self-preservation, and was also deterred by the additional knowledge that he probably wouldn't understand or recognise most of the things in the room.

A growing warmth in his pocket drew his attention and he reached inside automatically, which he belated realised perhaps was not the wisest course of action. It was just the orange feather, though, which he had kept in his robes since the previous night. He took it out and held it cautiously between his thumb and forefinger; it did not heat up any further.

He wondered what kind of bird it could be from. It was nearly the length of his forearm, but narrow, about two fingers wide. The bottom was a burnt russet which quickly lightened into a vibrant red and pale orange at the tips. It looked like a tongue of flame. The only birds he had ever seen with red or orange feathers were the finches at the park, bright flashes of colour darting among the hedges. They were far too small to have produced feather like this.

"Ah, you have it with you. Good," said the apparently returned Petri, breaking Harry's transfixion with the feather. Feeling a little faint, he shook his head and tried to focus on Petri, who was presently traversing the room.

"What is it?" Harry asked, a little reluctantly handing the feather to Petri when he extended his hand. This time, Petri did not flinch or make any indication that it hurt to touch, like he had the night before.

"It's a phoenix feather," said Petri. "The most powerful wand core, though it would be better if it were a tail feather."

"You're making a wand?" Harry asked, a little puzzled.

"Hardly," said Petri. "I'm making a false wand until I can acquire another."

"But why—"

"Sit down," said Petri, summoning a chair up to the worktable. Harry sat and closed his mouth, though he was burning with questions. Why did Petri need another wand? Why would he need a fake wand? Why use an actual wand core for a fake wand, instead of just a stick?

Petri set the phoenix feather on the table and reached into his robe pocket, producing his wand and a toothpick-sized stick. Then he tapped the stick and it expanded into a thin tree branch which looked like it had been snapped off one of the trees from outside.

"What's that?" Harry asked, seeing as it obviously was not willow. He yelped as Petri flung a stinging hex at him, probably for asking a stupid question. It hit his shoulder.

"It's a pine branch," said Petri. Harry rubbed his shoulder, deciding that the answer had been worth it.

Petri cut the branch to about a foot in length, put the tip of his wand to the branch, and appeared to apply a very precise and weak cutting charm as he ran it over the length and whittled away at the bark. It was not long before he had a smooth, thin stick that looked wand-like enough to Harry.

"Pine is one of the more conductive woods, I am told," said Petri. "I hope it will be enough."

Harry waited for some kind of elaboration, but Petri fell silent again as he worked. He hollowed out the stick and simply pushed the phoenix feather inside until it was entirely encased, and then filled in the bottom hole. It looked like a craft project Harry might have done in school rather than the making of an actual wand.

Then again, it was supposed to be fake. The difference escaped Harry.

Petri set down his wand and picked up the new one. He pointed it at the stack of parchment and a piece slid across the table.

"It works!" Harry blurted.

"It's only an amplifier," said Petri. "It can't be used to cast any spells."

Was that not the summoning charm? Harry did not say anything, however, and only waited.

"A real wand is enchanted to respond to incantations and movements, and to remember new incantations and movements. The enchantments to make that possible are incredibly complex and proprietary, so I only know of their existence and nothing more," Petri said.

Harry decided that it was safe to ask questions now.

"So someone had to put all the incantations into the wand?" he asked. He wasn't sure what he had thought up until now about how spells worked, but he supposed that it didn't make sense that shouting some magic words naturally made things happen.

Petri shook his head. "No. The wand learns as a wizard uses it."

Harry nodded, though he didn't entirely understand. "Why do you need a fake wand?" he asked instead.

"We won't be living in a tent forever," said Petri. Harry was glad to hear it, but confused by the non sequitur. "However, I cannot rent or buy a piece of land without a wand or some other identification, and I would be arrested if I showed my currently registered wand."

Harry nodded, idly patting his pocket where his own wand was. So a wand was identification, and Petri needed fake identification.

Petri's gaze darted to Harry's hand. "Unfortunately, your wand is also under my name, as you're under school age, so I cannot use that either. But this should do."

"Nobody will know it's fake?" asked Harry.

"A wand maker would, but the _Zollamt_ won't," Petri said.

" _Zollamt_?" Harry repeated, not catching the meaning, but Petri only nodded.

"We will be moving to Wizarding London tomorrow. I'm hardly brazen enough to show my face again in reach of the German Aurors." he said. Before Harry had time to recover from his surprise at this sudden development, Petri deemed the topic closed. "Now, as promised, I will teach you more about enchantment."

This declaration distracted Harry summarily from his other concerns.

"Generally speaking, enchantment is another word for a complicated charm that is meant to last a long time. The simplest and most common type of enchantment is called static inspiration, and this is what you'll be learning about today, and for the next few years at least," said Petri. He pulled the piece of parchment that he had summoned earlier closer to himself and extracted a quill from his pocket. Then he beckoned for Harry to come closer.

Harry got out of his seat and stepped around the table to look at what Petri was writing on the parchment with the clearly self-inking quill. He seemed to be making a list of lines and arrows which looked vaguely familiar. Harry realised that they were of the same sort as the ones he had seen on Petri's pensieve.

"This is enchanter's shorthand," Petri began to explain. "Enchantments can be very complex and it is best practice to write down the entire plan before beginning. Even a simple enchantment is helpful to write down." He flipped his quill in his grasp and pointed out the symbols with the tip of the feather.

"These are wand movements. You'll also see these in books to describe regular rhythm for complex spells," said Petri. Harry could see that the wand movement shorthand was fairly straightforward, with the movement itself simply drawn out and the direction indicated by an arrow.

Petri moved down on the page and pointed to something that looked like an upside-down "R" with an extra curl. "This is the conditional charm, which is necessary for most useful enchantments. It indicates when an effect should happen. And this," he said, pointing to a figure eight with a bulbous top, "represents the nullity charm, which you already know about. It is the end of most enchantments."

The other commonly used symbols in static inspiration represented the timing charm and several measurement charms for proximity and motion, but Petri said that Harry would learn these later as they were more delicate than he was currently capable of. Harry did not like it on principle to be told he couldn't do something, but he knew that Petri was probably right.

"The incantation for the nullity charm is _deleo,_ and the movement is like this, as you'll recall," said Petri, taking out his real wand and twirling it in precise circles. "Practise that. Right now," he added, as Harry glanced up uncertainly.

Harry pulled out his wand and tried to copy the movement, but it was more difficult than he expected to get it right. The wand tip seemed insistent on moving in a haphazard elliptic trajectory instead.

He could feel the weight of Petri's gaze on him, and was a little frustrated and embarrassed to be incapable of something as apparently simple as moving his wand in a circle. A glance upward revealed that the older wizard was somewhat nonplussed, but then his face smoothed out.

"Well, when you can manage it, we will try a simple enchantment," Petri said. Somehow, the lack of any condescension in his tone made everything worse. Harry flushed slightly, and slowed down his movement to try to round it out better. When he sped it up again, however, it returned to being stubbornly asymmetric.

"Stupid hand, ugh," Harry muttered to himself.

"Don't frustrate yourself," said Petri, with surprising kindness, as if he understood. "You are lacking years of experience in wand work. Even if you cannot manage an enchantment there is still plenty of theory for you to learn."

Harry grimaced at the word, "theory." It was necessary now and then, but he would rather get to the actual magic part. He just needed to make his hand cooperate.

His wrist hurt, but when the motion finally looked passably circular to him, he started with the incantation, " _deleo!_ "

Petri's hand shot out and caught Harry's arm, aborting his motion. "If you're ready to cast it, then try the entire enchantment. You are comfortable with the levitation charm?"

Harry nodded, lowering his wand and trying surreptitiously to rub his sore wrist.

"Good, then your first project will be to inspire something to levitate. Rosenkol!"

Rosenkol did not pop up immediately, and Harry remembered that they were in a trunk, and guessed that it wasn't possible to apparate into an expanded space from outside it. At least, Petri seemed to expect the wait. The elf appeared about ten seconds after he had been called.

" _Rosenkol steht dem Herrn zu Diensten,_ " said the elf rather primly.

"We need an apple," said Petri, and Rosenkol disappeared again with a snap of his fingers.

Joy. Fruit again. Harry wondered how many charms he could cast on a piece of fruit before it became inedible. Even if it was impossible to spoil food with benign magic, he still felt a bit queasy at the thought of eating something that had just been floating or tap-dancing supernaturally.

"This is a simple enchantment with just the levitation charm and the nullity charm. Write it down, for practice," said Petri, handing him the quill and sliding the parchment with the shorthand symbols over. Harry drew the swish and flick and the bulbous figure eight, and Petri nodded, though he corrected the flick with an extra arrow. Double arrow for sudden movements.

Rosenkol returned with the requested apple and an additional bowl of spares, which he levitated to the middle of the table. Petri nodded to him and dismissed him.

"Watch," said Petri. He pointed his wand at an apple, executed a swish and flick, incanting " _wingardium leviosa_ ," and then immediately thereafter, " _deleo,_ " and twirled his wand several times. He lowered his wand and the apple remained levitating, though it did nothing else.

Petri reached out and plucked the apple out of the air. He held it out and Harry took it without thinking, and immediately had his arm jerked upward as the apple tried to escape back to its original height. He yelped in surprise and let go, and the apple floated serenely back to where it had started.

"Your goal will be to produce this enchantment. The apple hovers at a constant level, and tries to return to it if disturbed," said Petri. He took another apple from the basket and set it on the table, gesturing for Harry to give it a try.

It sounded simple enough.

" _Wingardium leviosa deleo!_ " said Harry. His twirl was again misshapen and though the apple lurched slightly, it was back on the table before it had really lifted off. Having expected trouble with the nullity charm, he was not much deterred and simply tried again a few times.

On the fifth try he got an acceptable twirl, but the apple jumped up slightly, seemed to roll in the air, and then bounced against the edge of the table, before it then proceeded to fall to the floor.

"There are two things you should watch for," Petri said. "Your focus on the levitation charm must be enough to achieve your goal, and your willpower must be adequate for the nullity charm to last."

Harry nodded, though he didn't really understand how to put this advice into practice, and simply tried again. His nullity charm just needed to be stronger so it didn't run out.

A few more falls later, the apple was rather bruised, but Harry thought he was getting marginally better at the nullity charm. He gave a longer twirl than usual just to be sure.

The apple shot straight up and hit the ceiling, before bouncing on the table and onto the floor again and sending juice flying.

" _Reparo,_ " said Petri, sweeping his wand in a wide arc. The apple reconstituted itself and even returned to the tabletop.

"Can you still eat that?" Harry blurted. Petri blinked at him and did not answer for a moment, perhaps thrown by the spontaneity of the question.

"Yes, of course," he finally said. "It's mended."

"If someone ate that, could you mend it again? Inside them?" Harry asked, seized by morbid curiosity.

"Would you like to try?" Petri asked, swiping the apple from the table and holding it out. Harry shook his head rapidly. Petri laughed. "It's probably possible, with enough power," he said, "but that would be a gruesome death, don't you think?"

Death? Harry thought about it a little more and paled as he comprehended Petri's thought process. He wished he hadn't brought it up.

"Your exercise," Petri reminded him, and Harry gladly went back to trying to enchant the apple.

No matter what he did, however, the apple refused to stay in one place, or would not levitate for long before falling. One time, it rose up to match Petri's still-hovering apple, and just as triumph began to blossom in Harry's chest, it shuddered and proceeded to float gently up to the ceiling again.

"This is perhaps too advanced," said Petri, after about ten minutes of watching Harry and the disobedient apple.

"I've almost got it," Harry protested. " _Wingardium leviosa deleo!_ " The apple hovered, spinning lazily on its axis, and then spiraled down to the floor. Harry sighed and rubbed at the back of his neck in consternation.

"Wandwork comes with time," Petri said. "Understanding which spells to use when enchanting is more important."

"What's the use if I can't do any of it?" Harry cried, frustration threatening to boil over. "I can do it," he insisted.

"Keep practising, then," said Petri, and left Harry to it. Several minutes later, Harry lowered his wand to take a break and realised that he was as good as trapped in the trunk again. He scowled.

He didn't know what he was doing wrong. Actually, since Petri hadn't said anything, he was fairly certain that he was not doing anything wrong, exactly, but just doing it poorly. His apple was able to levitate by some description without him continuing to point his wand at it, so it was enchanted. It just wasn't anywhere close to perfectly enchanted the way Petri's example apple, which was still suspended motionless in the air, was.

Harry examined the example apple, giving it an experimental prod with the tip of his wand. It started to spin and continued spinning for a while, though it slowed and stopped eventually. Curious.

He swished and flicked his wand at his own apple and levitated it. When he moved his wand, it was like he could pull the apple along and direct it to where he wanted it to go, as long as he focused on it enough. He had it hover next to the example apple. It didn't seem to be the levitation charm that was the problem.

" _Deleo_ ," he said, twirling his wand, but as soon as he began the new wand motion the apple fell to the ground and rolled under the table. He sighed. So there was a reason all the wand motions had to be performed consecutively.

Harry's determination waned after another hour of doing the same thing over and over again without improvement. He was definitely better than when he had started, but it seemed like he could not stop the apple from spontaneously wandering away, and could not make the enchantment last more than a few minutes.

Petri hadn't come back, and Harry did not know if he was planning to return anytime soon. He wished he had thought to follow Petri outside and practise in the tent kitchen. It wasn't as if enchanting a floating apple was dark magic that had to be hidden.

Looking at the bowl of apples, an idea suddenly occurred to him.

"Rosenkol!" he called tentatively. Nothing happened, but he waited for a bit in hope. Just as he was about to berate himself for being foolish, the elf appeared before him with a pop.

"Wizardling is needing something?" he asked.

"Could you help me get out of the trunk? Please?" Harry asked. Rosenkol held out a spindly, wrinkled hand. Harry took it cautiously, and then there was a loud crack and the feeling of being squeezed on all sides before they reemerged at the antechamber of the trunk. "Thanks," he breathed, once he got his wits back together. Rosenkol was already climbing up the ladder with great dexterity.

The apples had come along with them, Harry saw, and were floating after Rosenkol, with the exception of the one Petri had enchanted. That one had appeared but seemed to refuse to follow the others. Harry snatched it, ready this time for its resistance, and climbed out of the trunk. Once out of the trunk, the apple seemed content to hover at the same relative level to the tent floor.

Petri walked into the office right at that moment, grabbed the floating apple, and took a bite out of it. Harry could not help staring at him as he ate the enchanted apple.

"The nullity charm was overloaded when I ate some of it," Petri said, returning Harry's gaze with an amused crinkling of the eyes.

Right. Harry gingerly reached over to take his practice apple (though he hardly intended to practise anymore today) and left the room as quickly as possible once he saw that Petri had nothing else to say to him.


	15. Immigrant

They were really moving to London, just like that. Harry was more than a little astonished at the alacrity with which they packed up. Petri removed his trunk from the tent and then folded it up with a few waves of his wand until it was rolled into a tight ball, and could be tied up with straps.

"Why don't you put it in the trunk?" Harry asked.

"To avoid an explosive death," Petri said. "A rule of the undetectable extension charm—never put a physically larger extended item in a smaller one."

"Oh," said Harry faintly, eyeing the trunk with new wariness. Perhaps that was why people didn't live in trunks; they were rather small, and one thoughtless error could be life-threatening.

Petri conjured a mirror and then began running his wand through his hair. As he did so, the straight locks scrunched up into curls, and salt-and-pepper brown lightened until it was a sandy blond. He scrutinised himself in the mirror for a few moments before murmuring, "Good enough."

Then he put a key into his trunk lock, turned it all the way around, and opened the lid. Harry peered over his shoulder and saw that it looked like the normal insides of an unexpanded trunk, except that it was filled with an assortment of glass things that could not possibly be stacked the way they were without magic. Harry saw everything from remembralls to fake glass eyes to tall wineglasses.

He thought he recognised most of them from Petri's shop. The shop had sold all kinds of objects, but now that he thought of it, the majority of items had been glass or china. That must be Petri's enchanting speciality.

Petri removed a pair of silver-rimmed, rectangular spectacles from the trunk and put them on. Harry saw several other pairs in the trunk, and reached self-consciously up to his own glasses, which were rather ugly and had been picked out of the charity bin. They had also been broken multiple times by Dudley and liberally sellotaped, but Harry had fixed them with the mending charm as soon as he'd learned it.

"Could I get new glasses?" he asked, figuring it was at least worth a try. Petri turned around, and was nigh unrecognisable. He had had a forgettable face in the first place, and it was buried beneath the superficial changes.

Petri grimaced slightly, and Harry found more familiarity in the expression. "These spectacles are worth more than your life," he said, but to Harry's surprise, he lifted a pair out of the trunk and held them out, clearly for Harry to try on.

Cautiously, he took the offering and switched it out with his old glasses. He could hardly see three feet in front of him, but he did notice Petri's wand approaching. He flinched back instinctively but Petri grabbed his shoulder and held him still. Then he tapped his wand on the frames and Harry blinked rapidly as the world came into focus.

"Tell me when it starts getting worse instead of better," Petri said. He tapped every few seconds, and Harry's vision improved beyond what he had thought possible.

"Er," he said, as his field of vision seemed to telescope. He felt a stab of pain in his temples. Petri paused, and then gave another tap, which seemed to adjust things back to acceptable levels.

"I think this is good," Harry said. At least, it was better than it had ever been.

"I'm no healer, but a faulty adjustment won't kill you," said Petri.

"It's great," said Harry, sincerely. "Thank you."

Petri held up the conjured mirror and Harry studied his reflection. His hair had grown rather long, not having had the luxury of a cut, especially his fringe, and it brushed the top of the frames. The new glasses were round just like his old ones, but the rims weren't as pronounced and they were bronze instead of thick black plastic. In general they looked better, but that was not a particularly high standard.

While he was busy looking at himself, Petri took the opportunity to charm his hair blond as well. Harry reeled a little at the change. His reflection looked very wrong, and he did not get used to it before Petri vanished the mirror.

"If you press here," Petri said, moving his hand up to his ear and pinching his frames, "you will be able to see through nearby solid objects."

Surprised, but then feeling foolish for being surprised, because of course the spectacles were enchanted, Harry tried out the feature. The trees nearest him melted away, though he was still somewhat aware of them, and he saw beyond them more trees.

"Also, if you hold your hands like so," Petri held up his hand right beside corner of his glasses, like he was pushing them up, "you can see what's behind you."

Harry tried this as well and promptly made himself dizzy as his peripheral vision seemed to expand until it extended impossibly far back in both directions. He let go and shook his head to try to clear it.

"It takes some time to accustom yourself," said Petri. "I suggest you use the regular setting for now. Also, if the _Zollamt_ asks, your name is Heinrich Peters. That is not the place to test the _fidelius_ charm."

Harry nodded. Petri shut the trunk, locked it, and pushed it toward Rosenkol, who was perched on top of the folded tent.

"Apparate to me when I call for you," Petri told the elf.

Then he held out his hand, and Harry took it, bracing himself for the multiple apparitions it would likely take to reach London. Apparating was every bit as horrible as it always was.

They appeared in the middle of a field, and then Petri pulled a length of red cord out of his pocket.

"A Ministry of Magic portkey," he said. Harry grimaced at the mention of portkeying, but he grabbed on. Petri murmured something under his breath and they were off. Harry closed his eyes as a hook behind his navel seemed to drag him along at an incredible speed.

Then they were still, and inside a telephone booth. Harry gasped and leaned against the wall, his heavy breathing fogging up the glass.

"Good, very precise," Petri seemed to be saying to himself, having landed with far better composure. He inspected the telephone for a few moments, during which Harry had to hold back the urge to explain how it worked, unsure that it would be well received. At length Petri picked up the phone without incident and dialled "62442."

Harry jumped as a cool female voice echoed around the entire booth and welcomed them to the Ministry of Magic, asking them their names and purposes.

"Jochen Peters and Heinrich Peters, moving to Britain," said Petri.

A pair of pins clattered out into the change bowl, and Petri took them, handing one to Harry. It read, "Heinrich Peters, Immigration." He followed Petri's example and pinned it to his robes, just as the voice said, "Visitor, please take the badge and attach it to the front of your robes. Visitor to the Ministry, you are required to submit to a search and present your wand for registration at the security desk which is located at the far end of the Atrium."

Then the floor rumbled and began to descend, as if they were in a lift, and Harry had to throw out an arm to steady himself. They were going to be searched?

The ride seemed to go on forever, pulling them deep into the bowels of the earth. Petri seemed very nonchalant, which made everything even more nerve-wracking. They were using fake identities right in the government centre! There was security! Harry couldn't see how it was going to work.

Then again, wouldn't it be good if Petri was arrested? He'd essentially kidnapped Harry, after all.

But the thought of the Dursleys, of giving up magic to go back to the likes of his relatives, was a supremely distasteful one. If he had to be eleven to go to school, that would be another year of staying with them. A year would be forever. And he had no idea how he was supposed to sign up or pay for school, either. The Dursleys certainly weren't going to do it for him.

He sneaked another glance at Petri. The man wasn't paying him any mind. He'd been more tolerable in the past few weeks than ever before, and Harry felt that he had learned an astronomical amount ever since he had finally been allowed to cast spells. Had it really only been a month? Even though all that had been precipitated by Petri attempting to kill him, Harry decided that he was better off where he was now than going somewhere unknown or, worse, back to a muggle life.

His nerves came back with full force just as the descent finally ended and almost blinding light seeped through the glass panes. The lift shuddered to a stop and the door opened itself. Petri stood to the side, gesturing for Harry to exit as the female voice wished them a pleasant day.

They had emerged into the vestibule of a vast atrium. Harry saw along both walls tall, ornate fireplaces, no doubt floo entrances. They seemed relatively free of traffic at the moment, only the occasional witch or wizard spinning out of the grates on the left side. The centre of the hall was dominated by an enormous fountain with a collection of golden statues in the centre. On the other end from where they had entered was a desk with a hanging sign that read, "Security."

Petri strode forward confidently, and Harry did his best to match his pace and keep his face straight. As they approached the fountain, Harry saw that several of the statues were of magical creatures. He recognised a house elf and thought that the half human, half horse must be a centaur.

They stopped at the security desk, where a bored-looking wizard in vividly blue robes sat, half-dozing. He righted himself at the sight of them and stood up, holding out a long golden rod, which he passed across Harry and Petri, and then between and behind them. Harry relaxed slightly when no alarm of any sort appeared to go off. He hadn't even noticed how tense he had been.

"Wands please," said the security wizard, and Petri handed him his new, fake wand. The wizard put it in a dish which hung from a horizontal bar. It shook, and then an opening at the base of the device spat out a slip of parchment. "Twelve and a quarter inches, phoenix-feather core, brand new, is that right? What happened to your old wand?"

"Stolen," said Petri, grimacing.

"You report that?" asked the wizard. Petri flashed his visitor badge.

"I have reported it to the German Ministry," he said. Harry wasn't sure, but he thought Petri must have thickened his accent there on purpose.

The security wizard bought this story, apparently, because he handed back the wand, stuck the piece of parchment on a spike next to the device, and then turned to Harry. Petri put a hand on his shoulder.

"He's only ten," he said. The wizard nodded and let them pass.

They waited by the lifts, and Petri perused an informational signboard. Harry, for his part, couldn't believe that they had got past the security so easily.

"What was that golden stick for?" he asked, in German, mindful that they were in public.

"It looks for dark magic and concealment charms," said Petri. "However, minor cosmetic charms do not count."

Harry nodded. It seemed like a silly oversight, but on the other hand, he expected that witches probably used a variety of cosmetic charms daily. Those seemed better than the countless powders and creams that Aunt Petunia would often employ.

The lift arrived and the golden gates opened with much clattering and grinding. Several people exited, and a witch in a wide-brimmed, starry hat entered with them.

As the lift ascended, the same cool voice that had spoken in the visitor's entrance announced the departments that were located on each level. On level seven, which apparently housed the Department of Magical Games and Sports, a swarm of violet paper aeroplanes entered the lift and the witch with the starry hat exited.

"Level six, Department of Magical Transport, incorporating the Floo Network Authority..."

"This is us," said Petri, and Harry followed him out. A few planes whizzed overhead. The walls of this hallway were light green, and there were heavy mahogany doors on either side of the hall, mostly shut. They walked all the way down the hall and turned the corner. On a section of glass panels, golden letters spelled out "Portkey Office."

Petri opened the door and went inside. A portly witch with small eyes sat behind the front desk and appeared to be busy stamping parchments. Petri stepped forward and waited patiently.

"Hello, how can I help you?" asked the witch after she finished applying the next stamp.

"We're moving here from Germany," Petri said. He took the red rope that they had used to portkey in and handed it over to the witch. She looked at a golden tag on the end and then squinted up at their visitor badges.

"Jochen Peters, right? Anything to declare?" she asked.

"Nothing," said Petri, holding out his empty hands as if that meant anything, in light of the kinds of extension charms that could be cast.

"I'll need your wand and one additional piece of identification," said the witch.

Another piece of identification? Harry looked up with some concern, but Petri handed over his wand and then calmly reached into his pocket and pulled out a thin metal chain, which he passed to the witch. She looked somewhat confused.

"My apparition licence," Petri said, and she glanced down the chain to where a silver ring dangled.

"Right, right. From the Continent… bit different from how we do it here," she said, taking the ring and setting it on one of the dishes of a scale-like device. She produced a golden coin from a drawer in the desk and put it on the other side, where it appeared to balance perfectly.

"Here's your wand back. Just put some magic into this one, like you're casting _lumos_ ," she said, giving Petri the pine wand back.

He touched the tip to the golden coin as indicated. "Ding!" went the scales, and spat out a piece of parchment.

"Looks good," said the witch, and gave him his ring and chain back as well. "You can apparate legally in Britain with your old licence, but you'll have to get it renewed to use the Ministry-sponsored Emergency Unsplinching Service for free. The Apparition Test Centre is just down the hall, if you want to make an appointment."

"Thank you," said Petri, slipping his licence and wand back into his pocket.

"Well, your wand's down in the registry," said the witch, "so you're done. Welcome to Wizarding Britain."

Harry let out a huge sigh of relief as they walked out of the office and back toward the lift. That had been… easy. He almost couldn't believe how little scrutiny they had been subject to.

"Was that really it?" he could not help asking.

"The British Ministry cares not who moves here, just if they register and pay taxes. I suspect the threat of the Dark Lord scared many families into fleeing the country a decade ago, and the population has not recovered," Petri said.

English. Given that they were in England, Harry supposed that Petri had deemed it prudent to speak the local language. Harry was glad to hear it.

They exited the lift at the atrium and crossed over to the fireplaces.

"We take the floo to Diagon Alley," said Petri. "Step inside after it turns green, and say 'Diagon Alley.' Make sure you say it clearly."

Petri counted out three knuts, which he put into the open beak of a peacock statue above the fireplace. The beak clicked shut, and the peacock's tail opened up, sending a puff of powder down the grate. The fire flared bright green.

Harry stepped inside and opened his mouth. He hadn't anticipated the smoke, however, and just as he said, "Diagon All—" he was seized by a coughing fit. It was too late. His world was swallowed up by green fire, and he was spinning round and round, the shapes of rooms and furniture whizzing past too quickly to be registered.

Everything stopped, and Harry kept going, spinning out over a grate and falling painfully to the stone ground.

"A customer!" a woman yelled rather exuberantly. Harry looked up from where he was sprawled out on the ground to see a rather ominously clawed hand held out to him.

"He looks a little young," said the owner of the hand from a ways above. Cautiously, not wanting to be rude, Harry grasped the hand and let himself be hauled to his feet. In fact, he was literally lifted up, and even lost contact with the ground for a moment before he was set back down.

The man who had picked him up was tall and extremely pale, with sunken eyes, like he hadn't slept in a fortnight. He gave Harry a tight-lipped smile.

"What is a child like you doing here?" he asked.

Harry guessed by this question that he was not where he was meant to be, ergo, not in Diagon Alley.

"I'm waiting for my master to come through," he said, which was true.

"Aren't you too young to be apprenticed?" asked the man.

"Or does he mean another kind of master?" It was the woman who had first spoken on his arrival. She proceeded to cackle—there was really no other word for it.

"I'm an enchanter's apprentice," Harry said quickly, trying to put a stop to the grating sound and the unwelcome speculation.

He finally looked over to its source and was completely taken aback. She had to be the ugliest person he had ever seen in his life, and then some. She was short, probably his height, and only barely seemed to see over the counter. The apparent lack of height was perhaps due to the fact that she was extremely hunchbacked. Her face was wrinkled like crumpled parchment, and seemed to be tinged a little green, and her long protruding nose sported several warts. A scraggly bush of grey hairs peeked out from underneath her small, black witch's hat, and appeared to cover her eyes completely.

"You and your master have business here?" asked the man, as if sceptical. Harry took the moment to tear his eyes away from the hideous woman and look around the dimly-lit shop.

It was obviously a funeral parlour. There were coffins of all shapes, colours, and sizes lining the walls. A heavy, black casket was on prominent display in the middle of the room. A sign next to it explained that it was spelled to play a funeral march whenever moved.

"Well, I'm not sure," said Harry, trying to hedge around the subject of being lost. There was definitely a threatening air about both shopkeepers. "He didn't say exactly."

The man looked expectantly at the floo, and Harry did as well, though with a sinking feeling in his chest. He had bought himself a few minutes, but what was he going to do when Petri failed to appear? Perhaps he could just leave the store, but then he might well be even more lost.

Luckily, the fireplace flared green in that moment and deposited a man into the shop. Unluckily, it wasn't Petri.

It was Lucius Malfoy.

Lucius Malfoy took one look at each of the occupants of the store, sneered, and said, "Unhand that boy!" despite the fact that nobody had a hand on Harry at all. Nonetheless, the pale man took a step back. "Come along," Malfoy said to Harry, seized his arm, and practically dragged him out of the shop.

A bell tinkled mournfully behind them as they emerged on a rather run-down, unevenly paved street. Malfoy let go of him immediately and shook out his hand, as if he'd just been touching something filthy.

"Where are your parents?" asked Malfoy.

"Dead," said Harry, because he couldn't help it. Lucius Malfoy had caused him a lot of trouble. While it was true that maybe if Malfoy hadn't shown up, he would still be an unpaid shopkeeper in Germany and not learning as much magic as he was now, Harry didn't like to spend time on what-ifs. Malfoy had started the mess that led to Harry almost getting killed.

"Don't be cheeky, boy. Your guardians? You realise that you were alone with a vampire and a hag? Filthy creatures that wouldn't think twice about eating a wizard child?"

Malfoy actually sounded indignant on his behalf, which somewhat mystified Harry. Still, that neither the hideous woman nor the pale man was human, and might have eaten him, _was_ rather troubling news.

Harry decided that it would be all right to relate most of the truth to Malfoy. "I got lost in the floo," he said. "I coughed when I was trying to say 'Diagon Alley.' Where are we, anyway?"

He looked around for some street sign, but there were only shopfronts in every direction. The shop they had just exited was rather aptly named "Coffin House." Right next to it was "ELM and Wizards Undertakers and Embalmers," with the slogan, "Cross Over in Mesmerising Style."

Lucius Malfoy sighed. "This is Knockturn Alley. You're lucky you didn't stray too far. Diagon Alley is at the end that way," he said, pointing with his cane. "Still, this is no place for a child to wander. I shall walk you back after I conclude my business here."

Harry thought he would be perfectly capable of walking down the empty street on his own, but Malfoy was rather forceful and Harry doubted his chances in an argument. He only nodded and followed Malfoy across the alley. Malfoy did not appear to be trying to kidnap him, at any rate. That interest seemed reserved for Harry Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived.

Malfoy entered the shop across from the Coffin House. The sign above the door read, "Borgin and Burke's," which gave little indication of what was sold there.

It looked like a junk shop to Harry, if a somewhat high-end one, as there were assorted apparently unrelated objects placed neatly on shelves and display stands. Unlike in Petri's shop, nothing looked obviously magical or enchanted, but there seemed to be a threatening aura around some objects. The atmosphere of the shop was also still and gloomy.

The man behind the counter perked up at the sight of Malfoy, and gave a very fake smile. "Oh, Mister Malfoy, good to see you. How do you do? Is this your son?"

"No," said Malfoy, and the shopkeeper immediately closed his mouth like he had swallowed a lemon. Harry remembered that he was currently blond, and wasn't sure whether to be amused or disgusted at the mistake.

"Mr Borgin, care to inform me why your fireplace was blocked? I was forced to floo across the alley," said Malfoy.

"I'm terribly sorry, sir," said Borgin, not looking particularly sorry at all, "but the Network Authority maintenance crew just came by for a tune-up. Unfortunate timing, sir."

"Never mind that, then. I have something for you, as we discussed," Malfoy said, withdrawing a small brown packet from his pocket and putting it on the counter. Borgin took the package rather gingerly, nodding. It seemed shady to Harry, or perhaps it was just that everything Malfoy did seemed shady.

Just then, Harry remembered that he could see through things with his new glasses. Taking a deep breath to prepare for the disorientation, he reached up and tapped the side of the frames surreptitiously. His vision turned blurry and strange, and he found himself focused on the storage shelves apparently in the back of the shop. That was too much!

Fortunately, his wish to see less was effective, and layers of wood and stone came back together to form a wall, and then Harry glimpsed for a disgusting moment the literal inside of Borgin's head, and finally he managed to concentrate upon Malfoy's parcel.

Inside it appeared to be a necklace with a big, green jewel. It looked valuable, but Harry couldn't discern anything else about it. He tapped his glasses again to put his vision back to normal, disappointed. Malfoy and Borgin were discussing something in a low voice, but presently Malfoy leaned back, apparently satisfied, and Borgin carried the packet with the necklace into the back of the shop.

"Come along," said Malfoy, and led Harry out of the shop and up the street.

A man was coming toward them, and for a moment Harry did not recognise him, but then they walked closer and he realised it was the disguised Petri.

"That's him! My, er, uncle," he said, remembering that he had told Malfoy his parents were dead.

"Uncle Jochen," he called. Petri was already heading straight toward them.

"Heinrich," said Petri, "Thank Merlin I found you."

It wasn't the kind of thing Harry expected out of Petri's mouth at all, but he supposed that was the point. It would be bad if Lucius Malfoy recognised him.

"I found him in a shop with a vampire and a hag," said Malfoy. "You'd best keep a better watch of your nephew, Mr…?"

"Peters," said Petri. Malfoy immediately gained an expression of disdain. "Thank you, er,"

"Malfoy. Lucius Malfoy," said Malfoy rather pompously.

"Thank you Mr Malfoy," said Petri. Malfoy gave a stiff nod and then left, without even bidding them good day.

"No doubt he thinks I'm a mudblood," said Petri with a laugh, after Malfoy had moved out of earshot. They started walking at a leisurely pace.

"He didn't recognise you at all," said Harry.

"Why should he pay a mudblood any mind?" Petri asked rhetorically. "Anyway, what did I say about speaking clearly?"

"Sorry," said Harry. "I couldn't help coughing."

"You'll know for next time," Petri said. "I suppose your adventure was enough of consequence. A hag and a vampire, really?"

"I ended up in this shop called the Coffin House," Harry said.

"That one?" asked Petri, pointing. Harry noticed finally that they had been walking not out of Knockturn Alley, but deeper into it.

"Yeah," he said. "I thought we were going to Diagon Alley?"

"That was the only floo address I had. We're looking for an inn called the White Wyvern," said Petri. "I believe this is it." He nodded to the left, and Harry looked past the undertaker's.

There was a tattoo parlour advertising animated tattoos in the window. A set of stairs led up behind it to the second storey of an unmarked brick building. A sign with a stylised white dragon hung from a bar at the top of the staircase, and beneath it read, indeed, "The White Wyvern."

They climbed the stairs, and found a rather scarred wooden door. Petri pushed it open and immediately heat and the smell of grease wafted over them. The murmur of voices, punctuated by clinking cutlery, enveloped them as they entered. Petri made for the bar, and Harry followed closely, not eager to be separated again.

"How much for a room?" Petri asked the innkeeper.

"Depends," was the answer.

To his credit, Petri did not get the cheapest possible room, but only the second least expensive. It was on the fourth floor and tiny, just big enough for a bed, a wardrobe, and a rickety dressing table with a tall mirror. The bathroom was similarly cramped, just a cube with a toilet and a grimy-looking shower stall. It was only thirteen sickles a night. Petri had said they would be staying for a week.

"I have errands to run," said Petri. "Stay here, unless you want to be eaten by a hag. They especially like the taste of children."

With that, Petri left him in the little room.

Harry waited a few minutes before he was bored out of his mind. He opened the door and looked into the hallway, but of course Petri had no reason to have lingered, and was long gone. The cackling hag in the shop had been repugnant to look at, but she did not particularly scare him, certainly not enough to stop him from exploring a little.

He wasn't sure how long Petri would be out, and didn't fancy getting a lashing curse, but he though that going downstairs to the pub was well within the bounds of "staying here."

Harry crammed himself into the narrow, incredibly steep stairway and cautiously climbed down toward the noisy pub. It was crowded and the smell alternated unpredictably between an inviting, meaty aroma and the sour stench of old beer with every step. Harry looked around to see if there was an empty table where he could sit, but it looked like even an empty seat would be unlikely.

The smell of food reminded him that he was hungry—ravenous really, because he hadn't eaten since last night, as Petri was not an advocate of breakfast. He didn't have any money on him, however, so he would have to stand the torturous proximity to sustenance that he couldn't touch. He was a little out of practice, having been out of the Dursleys' care for awhile. Petri never had anything appetising around anyway, to require this particular skill.

Harry crossed the room and stood indecisively by the entrance. The pub was full of adults who seemed very engrossed in their business, and wasn't all too interesting. If he went outside, he would definitely be disobeying Petri, and could be caught. On the other hand, there were hags inside the White Wyvern, too. He saw a whole table of the hideous, warty creatures playing cards and snacking on what appeared to be raw meat. The woman back in the Coffin House received a revised opinion of being relatively good-looking for a hag.

The door opened, almost hitting him, and Harry realised belatedly that he had unconsciously drifted backward and put himself in the way.

"It's you again," said a familiar voice, and Harry looked up to see the man—the vampire—from the Coffin House standing in the door. "Where's your master? Well, anyway, tell him that he can't just use our floo to get into the alley. Customers only."

He waited expectantly for some acknowledgement, and Harry decided that now was the time to dissociate himself Lucius Malfoy as much as possible.

"That man wasn't my master," he said. "I've never seen him before in my life. He just grabbed my hand and dragged me outside." From the point of view of Lucius Malfoy, at least, that story was true.

The vampire stared at him for a few moments, probably trying to decide whether to believe him. Harry's stomach took the opportunity to growl loudly, and he flushed.

"Well, no one else appeared looking for a wayward apprentice, so I assumed," said the vampire slowly. "Why don't we get something to eat?"

"We?" Harry repeated, alarmed. "Uh, that's all right. My master is just out on an errand. I'll just go… somewhere."

"I insist," said the vampire. "You're awfully young to be left on your own. Oh, but you don't know who I am. My name is Silviu."

"I'm Harry," said Harry, without thinking. It was the third time, he noticed, that the vampire, Silviu, had brought up how young he was.

"Good to meet you, Harry. You don't mind if we sit up by the counter?" Silviu asked. Harry minded very much that the vampire had put a hand on his shoulder and was steering him toward the counter already, but wasn't sure what he could do or say without stirring up a fuss. Silviu wasn't doing anything really wrong, yet.

"Charles, hello," said Silviu to the innkeeper.

"Silviu, what are you doing out and about during the day?" asked the innkeeper.

"I just hate waking early so I thought I'd just stay up all day. I have to fill in for Leticia this afternoon because she has an appointment with some hedge wizard or other for her toothache. I think she's better off seeing a healer but she doesn't want to show her face in St. Mungo's. You know how it is," said Silviu very rapidly.

Casually, Silviu picked Harry up like he weighed nothing and set him on one of the tall barstools, and then took a seat beside him.

"Who's this?" asked Charles, and then he looked closer. "Oh, it's you. Room 412, right?"

Harry nodded.

"He's staying here?" asked Silviu. Harry glanced at his half-open mouth and confirmed the presence of long, sharp fangs.

"Well of course, why else would he be here?" answered a somewhat puzzled Charles.

"Alone?" Silviu pressed.

"Heavens no," said Charles. "Don't get any designs on my paying customers now."

"I wasn't," said Silviu, suddenly defensive, his clawed hands held up. "I was just worried. You know how people like Leticia are. 'Oh I just couldn't resist, it was an accident' and then they're Dementor food."

Charles snorted. "That's a stretch."

"Not as much as you think. Anyway, stew for both of us," said Silviu. Charles nodded. "No garlic," he added.

"Of course," said Charles.

"Er," Harry began, but he was entirely at a loss for what to say. Silviu looked at him expectantly. "Well," Harry tried again, "I don't have any money on me."

"Don't worry about that," said Silviu. "It's just lunch."

Harry had to admit that stew sounded good right now. That is, if it was what he thought it was, and not some codeword for something else. Didn't vampires exclusively drink blood?

"So Harry, what brings you to Knockturn Alley?" Silviu asked.

Harry had no idea what to say. It wasn't as if he could confess _now_ that he had misspoken in the floo. He wasn't sure what Petri wanted to do here either.

"I don't know. My master has some business, I guess. We just moved here," he said. It was more or less the truth.

"Moved from where?" asked Silviu.

"Germany," said Harry.

"Ah, Germany, wonderful place. I have cousins there, in the Black Forest," said Silviu.

"Oh," Harry said rather faintly. Of course there would be vampires in the Black Forest. Suddenly, he was much more grateful for the protective enchantments that Petri had meticulously set up outside their tent.

Silviu seemed to catch on that he was making Harry uncomfortable, because he started to talk about himself instead. "I'm from Transylvania myself," he said. "Moved to Britain about a decade ago."

Harry was reminded of what Petri had said this morning, that people had been fleeing Britain a decade ago to get away from the Dark Lord, except this was the opposite.

"Why?" Harry asked, interested despite himself.

"Regulations in Transylvania were getting tighter. The Ministry seizing our wands. I left just in time," Silviu said, the last coming out a little darkly. Harry blinked in some confusion. If he recalled correctly, and he wasn't sure, because this law seemed to be flaunted at every turn, non-humans were not allowed to have wands anywhere in Europe, and vampires were non-human.

Silviu caught his expression and said, a little conspiratorially, "You tell them you're half human here and they can't tell the difference."

Harry laughed along, a little uneasily.

Their stew arrived, and Harry was relieved to see that it was a regular beef stew. It looked like beef, at any rate. Silviu slid a few sickles across the counter.

"Keep the change," he said.

Harry watched the vampire eat several bites of stew before he dug into his own. It was good, if a little salty, and he relished the warmth settling in his stomach.

He was just finished with his stew when he spotted Petri entering the pub. The man walked up to the counter and was about to pass him by without noticing. Harry realised that if he went upstairs and found Harry gone he might be angrier, so he called out to him.

"Er, Master, er, Jochen. Master Jochen!"

Fortunately, Petri responded to the false name and turned around.

"So this is the fabled master?" asked Silviu. Harry thought he sounded a little too surprised. The vampire had probably thought that Harry had been lying the whole time about having supervision.

Petri's eyes darted from Harry to the vampire. "And you are?" he asked.

"Silviu, co-owner of the Coffin House," said Silviu. Fortunately, it seemed that Petri was able to connect the dots from there.

"My name is Jochen," said Petri. "Pleased to meet you. Thank you for looking after my apprentice this morning. He misspoke the floo address."

Harry felt himself flush as Silviu glanced briefly at him.

"I thought it might have been something like that," said Silviu. "Well, no harm done."

"Luckily," said Petri. "Oh, I forgot to leave him with spending money. Here, how much was the food?"

Harry was sure he had forgotten nothing of the sort.

"A trifle," said Silviu. "We had a good conversation."

"I insist," said Petri.

"I as well. Why don't you bring him around the shop tonight for tea?" asked Silviu. A most random invitation.

"And impose more? I couldn't," said Petri.

"No imposition," said Silviu. "I like to make the acquaintance of everybody in the alley. You're moving here, yes, or am I mistaken?"

Petri narrowed his eyes shrewdly, and some unspoken understanding seemed to pass between him and the vampire. "That is the hope," he said. "I'm looking for a flat. Preferably unspelled, unfurnished."

"I may know someone," said Silviu. "Come at eleven, tonight. My shop, with your young apprentice too. It's just next door."

"I shall," Petri agreed.

"What time is it now?" Silviu asked, not speaking to anybody particular. Harry noticed that he was now holding a dark red wand, confirming that he was in fact in violation of the wand carrying law. "Almost one," he said, answering his own question. The time-telling access spell, then. "That's it for my lunch break. I will see you both later."

With that, Silviu waved Charles the innkeeper over, bid him adieu, and left the premises, casting some spell over himself just before he stepped out the door.

Petri ushered Harry up the narrow stairs.

"One encounter with a vampire was not enough, I see," said Petri. He slashed his wand and Harry knew better than to dodge the violet curse. He grit his teeth as the skin on his back felt like it was being split apart repeatedly, and leaned against the door to stay standing. Petri lifted the curse quickly enough, clearly impatient to give him a tongue lashing in addition.

"Vampires are not to be trifled with," he said. "Grown wizards are often hard-pressed to fight one off. Let's not start on a vampire with a wand. He'll have a spell to counter every one of his weaknesses."

"I'm not fighting him," Harry protested when Petri stopped to take a breath.

"You're lucky he had no desire to eat you. If he had, he could be halfway across the continent before the aurors heard about it," Petri said.

"He's lived here for a decade," Harry argued. "Why would he want to lose that?"

Petri sighed. "I see you have become friends already," he said. "This… Silviu does seem uncommonly civilised. That raises the question of how he eats."

Harry supposed that that question had been troubling him earlier as well. "You could fight him off if you had to, couldn't you?" he asked.

Petri snorted. "Likely not without resorting to obvious dark magic. I would prefer not to."

"Me too," said Harry. "He seems nice," he added, perhaps just to be contrary.

"Many people seem nice," said Petri.

Harry bit back a rejoinder about how Petri didn't even manage that. Then he remembered Mrs. Figg, and how convinced she had been that he was a good person, or something like that. She was going to get her kneazle back, and she would never know what horrible thing Petri had done to it.

She must already have it back, Harry supposed. That delivery had probably been one of Petri's errands.

As much as he loathed to admit that Petri was right, Harry knew he shouldn't be too quick to trust Silviu, in case the vampire turned out to be horrible after all. But if Petri was right too about how hard it was to fend off vampires, then what was the point? Harry wouldn't be able to do anything about it anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm interested in Knockturn, since even though it seems dark and menacing to Harry in the books it can't actually be obviously illegal stuff or the DMLE would be all over it. Yes, the Ministry is pretty incompetent in canon, and I've tried to preserve that (look at that conveniently insecure portkey customs and total lack of immigration controls), but it can't be completely useless. And Hagrid goes to Knockturn for legitimate reasons. Also the only store we ever see is Borgin and Burke's, which is actually just an antique shop, hardly evil. I'm using other shop names from the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.
> 
> There isn't much canon material on vampires, but what there is suggests that they can coexist reasonably well with wizards (Sanguini and Worple, that part-vampire celebrity singer Lorcan d'Eath). On the other hand they are still a dark creature and feared by many (Quirrell's supposed traumatisation at the hands of Black Forest vampires being believable, Lockhart's Voyages with Vampires, Rita Skeeter calling for their extermination). I will run with Bram Stoker on everything else, though probably watered down because Dracula was kind of OP. As for hags, Harry saw one at the Leaky Cauldron once so it must be possible for them to upstanding citizens... even though they eat human flesh, especially children. I'm still working on that one.


	16. Tenant

Harry and Petri arrived at the Coffin House at eleven in the evening, just as agreed. Harry was rather exhausted from the long day's activities, but trepidation and excitement kept him awake and alert. Petri pushed open the door and the bell sounded a single heavy note, and then another at length, not unlike a funeral toll.

"Charming," Petri murmured under his breath as he held the door open for Harry.

"Welcome!" said Silviu cheerfully from behind the counter. The hag was nowhere in sight. Now that it was night time, Silviu seemed far livelier and less sleep-deprived than before, though Harry would wager that the vampire hadn't slept during the day at all.

The shop was more brightly lit at night than during the day; torches burning a steady cobalt flame were screwed into the wall every few feet, lending the shop a subtly wavering, ethereal ambiance. The placards in front of each coffin glowed softly, presumably to aid legibility, and here and there some coffins were more brightly lit than others, almost as if under spotlights.

Silviu waved his illegal wand and the coffin-shaped sign bearing a twinkling "OPEN" in the window shuddered, its letters losing their shape and slithering about until they said "CLOSED" instead.

"I think I'll call it an early night after this," said Silviu, "to catch up on sleep. Nothing better than a good tea party before bed. Make yourselves comfortable."

He flicked his wand at the casket displayed in the middle of the room and turned it onto its side. Several pillows sprang out of it arranged themselves on the floor, before the lid fell shut. Then he furrowed his brows and conjured a black shroud to lay over the casket. It was a funeral pall, but clearly meant to serve as a tablecloth in this instance.

Harry noticed that Petri was looking at Silviu with a somewhat pinched expression. Silviu smiled, showing his fangs.

"One of my favourite tricks," he said. Harry was sure he was missing some kind of subtext.

"Very impressive," said Petri, and took a seat on one of the cushions. Harry sat down as well.

"I'll fetch the tea," said Silviu, and disappeared into the back of the shop.

Harry was reminded of the visit to Mrs. Figg. Petri, he was sure, would have just used a summoning charm. He used magic for everything, even to retrieve objects that were in plain sight or to stir sugar into his tea. Mrs. Figg, being apparently a squib, did things largely the muggle way. Perhaps Silviu was also unaccustomed to resorting to magic.

Harry inspected the conjured tablecloth. It was very solidly woven. Silviu had taken out his wand and used it immediately when they entered. Petri had called it impressive. Harry guessed, very uncertainly, that it was some kind of show of force.

Silviu returned with a dragon-patterned white china tea set and a jar of loose tea leaves. He opened the teapot and shook some leaves inside.

"If you could take care of the water, please," he said to Petri, who obligingly raised his wand.

" _Aguamenti,_ " Petri said softly, moving his wand in a small, sideways S, and a stream of pure water arced from the tip and into the pot. " _Relashio_ " he said, dipping his wand into the water and giving a small jab. The pot shuddered, and a puff of steam rose up from the now-boiling water.

"Interesting choice," Silviu remarked. He set his red wand down on the makeshift table, and Petri mirrored him.

"I prefer it to the warming charm for boiling water," said Petri. "It's much faster, as you can see."

"You're a charms master?" asked Silviu.

"Yes, an enchanter," said Petri.

"Very impressive," said Silviu, echoing Petri's earlier statement. "But your apprentice is so young. Surely he isn't already well-studied enough to enchant?"

Harry glanced at his knees, feeling himself flush as he remembered his failure with the floating apple.

Silviu caught his movement, apparently, because he said, "Not to slight you at all, young Harry, but I am concerned, you understand."

"He is very capable," said Petri, who had turned to look at Harry at the mention of his name. Harry remembered now that he had told Silviu his actual name. Technically, he told himself, Heinrich was just German for Henry, and Harry was a nickname for Henry, so it wasn't obviously wrong. "I am of the mind that enchanting theory is best learned at a young age," Petri was saying.

"Oh?" said Silviu. He picked up the teapot and poured them each a steaming cup. Harry picked his up cautiously and found that it was cool to the touch. He blew gently and sipped, but it was still too scalding to taste, so he set it down quickly.

"I don't know how much you know about the schooling at Durmstrang, or Hogwarts," Petri began. He added a sugar cube to his tea and, lacking a wand, picked it up and swirled it.

"Not much, I confess," said Silviu. "I learned from my family and from books."

"The focus is on equipping students with strong spellcasting foundations, not necessarily to teach them particular spells that might be useful. Enchantment, however, is always done with a goal in mind, some use," said Petri.

"I see," said Silviu. "So a mind for enchantment is a mind for useful spells. But if I may, how did Harry come into your care?"

"Why do you ask?" asked Petri.

"I ask because it is frankly unsafe for a child in Knockturn Alley," said Silviu. "If you wish to live here, he cannot stay. Perhaps he could return home and see you only for lessons."

"I'm afraid I am his only guardian," said Petri.

"I see," said Silviu. "Then perhaps you would consider renting nearby, in Carkitt Market or Horizont, or even in a village somewhere. You can always floo in."

"I can protect my apprentice adequately," said Petri.

"That may be true," said Silviu, "But it is not me that you would have to convince of it. It is one thing to stay a few nights at the White Wyvern, and another to live here indefinitely. The landlords I know of will simply not accept the risk."

"The risk?" Petri asked. Silviu laughed mirthlessly.

"If a dark creature seriously injures or kills someone on your property, did you know that you can get up to a hundred galleon fine and six months in Azkaban for not meeting minimum security standards?" Silviu asked. "Nobody in Knockturn Alley meets minimum security standards. Hags own half the street and everyone else would go out of business. All hags think they can control themselves but they can't. It's their instinct and there isn't a good enough suppression potion to stop it forever."

He hissed, as if trying to expunge every last bit of air from his lungs. Harry stared at the obviously agitated vampire, but looked down quickly as Silviu's dark eyes locked on to his momentarily.

"Are hags the only worry?" Petri asked, after waiting a beat. Silviu narrowed his eyes, picked up his cup and saucer, and sipped it delicately.

"I've never seen an erkling around here," said Silviu. It sounded like a joke, but the meaning escaped Harry. Petri snorted. More seriously, Silviu added, "My friends and I do not make a habit of attacking witches and wizards, if you're worried about us."

"I wasn't," said Petri easily, though Harry thought it must be a lie. Silviu looked sceptical but did not comment further.

Instead, he said, "Regardless, I am simply advising you that you won't find a place that accepts young children, even if he's learned spells to ward off hags. There have been too many cases of missing children already."

"You've allowed Harry in your shop," said Petri. Silviu closed his eyes in obvious annoyance. Harry was unsure what Petri was playing at, being so deliberately obstinate to the vampire.

"What was I going to do, throw him onto the street? At least I was there," said Silviu. "If you aren't aware, my business partner is a hag."

"This is a realty office, if I'm not mistaken," said Petri. Harry blinked, nonplussed, but Silviu did not look confused, only suspicious.

"Not your kind of realty," he said immediately.

"I am interested," Petri insisted.

"That wouldn't be strictly legal," said Silviu. Petri looked meaningfully down at Silviu's wand, and the vampire closed his eyes and inclined his head. "Fine. Come again tomorrow night. I'll have some places for you to look at."

"I shall," said Petri with a tight-lipped smile. Seeing that the talk was nearly over, Harry took the opportunity to gulp down the rest of his no longer scalding tea. Petri's cup was still nearly untouched. "Any particular time?"

"At your leisure," said Silviu. "We'll be open all night." He smiled back sardonically, showing his teeth.

There were some last pleasantries, though they teetered on the edge of unpleasant, and then the bells tolled behind them as they stepped onto the dark street. The light from the Coffin House dimmed and then went out, leaving them with only faint starlight as a guide.

The complete lack of any streetlights disturbed Harry. He hadn't noticed it as much on the short walk there, as some shops had still been open, their windows casting orange rectangles of light onto the uneven alley stones, but these had all closed in the meantime. Harry guessed that it was almost midnight.

He had been bursting with questions as they exited the shop, but now trepidation kept him silent. The chilly gloom was oppressive. He couldn't tell if Petri was angry or pleased, and the man walked silently and briskly without looking at Harry at all.

The White Wyvern, too, was more subdued than it had been earlier. The bar was still full of patrons, but they sat sipping their drinks alone, or conversed in low voices and with their heads close together. Harry, having grown more used to Silviu, thought he saw another vampire on the stool at the very end. A very dour-looking woman stood behind the bar, polishing a glass, while Charles the innkeeper was nowhere to be seen.

Petri ushered Harry up the steps. Strange, almost alarming sounds permeated the hall. Harry thought he heard heavy breathing. Was somebody having a nightmare?

They went into their room and shut the door, but the uncomfortable sounds seemed to get louder, as dimmer, background noises were cut out. Petri had acquired a very pinched expression. He pulled out his wand and drew it in a circle around him.

" _Silencio,_ " he said. The sound cut off. He sighed and put his wand away. Harry made a mental note of the spell. It seemed useful.

"Clever creature, this vampire," said Petri, sitting down on the bed and rolling his shoulders back, "making noise about hags as if they were a threat to more than mudbloods." He reached into his robe pocket and took out a quill and a short roll of parchment.

"Aren't they?" Harry had to ask. Silviu had suggested that they couldn't control their child-eating habits, which Harry thought was pretty alarming. "I mean, I _don't_ know how to ward them off."

"Their magic is weak," said Petri. "They're hard to kill, but only that. They're slow. A hag grabs you, you say you'll call the aurors. If that doesn't work, you cast the severing charm on their head."

Harry felt a little horrified at that advice. "I thought it didn't work on people," he protested.

"On _people_ ," Petri agreed, making it very clear what he thought about Harry mistaking hags for people. "As I said, they're hard to kill. They won't die."

Harry was only a little bit relieved to hear it, his traitorous mind still conjuring up images of the hag at the Coffin House and how it might look like for her wrinkled head to separate from her body. He shuddered.

"Still," said Harry. "What if I lost my wand? Or what if it didn't work? My severing charm isn't that good yet."

"Are you a mudblood?" asked Petri with some exasperation, finally turning to look at him. Harry shook his head, rather thrown. "No? Then your magic will respond when you are in danger. Do not worry," said Petri with finality, going back to his parchment.

Harry was unconvinced, but knew by now when to hold his tongue. He might not be a mudblood, but that didn't mean he knew how to control magic without a wand. Back when he had been living at Number Four, Privet Drive, his magic had much more often got him into deeper trouble than he'd already been in, what with incidents like turning his teacher's hair blue because he was embarrassed or flying up onto the school roof while running from Dudley. Changing a hag's hair colour wasn't going to do anybody any favours.

Not wanting to dwell on the matter, he peered into the tiny lavatory to see what he could do about preparing for bed. "Is my toothbrush here?" he asked.

"Rosenkol," said Petri, not even raising his voice. Rosenkol appeared immediately anyway with a faint pop, suggesting that he had already been nearby. "Get our toiletries."

As Rosenkol snapped his fingers, Harry noticed Petri's trunk at the foot of the bed, half hidden behind the hem of the man's robes. There wasn't a toilet in the trunk, as far as he had seen—perhaps that was the only thing preventing it from being a proper dwelling. That, and the lack of beds. Harry wondered why Petri didn't just make these additions. Clearly, since the expanded tent had its own toilet, such things were possible.

Petri didn't look like he was about to use the sink, as he seemed to be lost in thought with a quill poised over his parchment, so Harry took the opportunity to clean up first. As he brushed his teeth, he considered the cryptic meeting with Silviu.

Spitting into the basin, he asked, "So Silviu sells houses too?"

"He sells coffins," said Petri. Harry had the feeling that he was being deliberately obtuse.

"Yeah, but what's that got to do with… we're not living in a coffin, are we?" Harry demanded. He remembered that the shop was called the Coffin _House_ , which wasn't promising, given the current context.

Petri didn't answer him. Frustrated and rather concerned as he was, Harry could see that further questioning would get him nowhere, and resolved to try tomorrow.

In the morning, Petri literally levitated a groggy Harry out of the bed and charmed his robes on.

"Come along," he said, already one foot out the door. Harry scrambled to follow.

"Where are we going?" he asked. He wasn't sure he wanted to know what time it was. The room was tinged with the pale blue of daybreak, and the corridor was still dark.

"The bank," said Petri.

Harry woke up enough to notice that Petri had his trunk in hand, and inferred that they were going to make a deposit. Where the galleons Petri had earned from his enchanting shop and his other business were kept, Harry had little idea, but he guessed that at least part of Petri's fortune was stashed inside the trunk. He wondered if there had been any in a German bank that had been confiscated. Likely not, given that he hadn't seen Petri going mad with fury. Harry couldn't imagine that the man would have kept quiet if something like that had happened.

The bar was almost empty, though Charles was there. He waved as they exited, and Petri gave him a curt nod. Harry waved back.

The sun was still in the process of coming up over the horizon, only a few stray beams managing to clear the rooftops and penetrate the gloom of the alley. Most of the shops were closed, though Borgin and Burkes, the strange shop that Lucius Malfoy had dragged Harry into, looked to be open already, if the moving silhouettes in the window were any indication.

A shabby woman pushed a large, sodden mop along the street, apparently to clean it. The mop gave off a horrible, acrid smell, and Harry had to hold his breath as they passed.

Further up the alley, there was a hag peddling what disturbingly appeared to be sets of whole human nails. She leered at Harry, but shrunk back when Petri turned to glare at her, and they turned onto Diagon Alley without incident. It was brighter here, with only a relatively low brick archway standing in the way of the sun's rays. They walked away from the arch, toward an imposing, blindingly white building which faced the street obliquely.

Petri led them confidently up a set of marble steps. Harry could not help staring a little at the creature standing beside the shiny bronze doors. He was slightly shorter than Harry, dressed in a scarlet uniform with gold trimmings, and had pointed ears and a pointed face accentuated by a sharp goatee. As they passed, the creature bowed to them, and Petri had to put a hand on Harry's shoulder to hurry him along.

Inside there was another set of doors, silver this time, flanked by another pair of the creatures. There was some kind of poem engraved there, but Petri pushed the doors open too quickly for Harry to read it.

They entered an enormous, glittering hall. Dark wooden paneling covered in gilded designs contrasted against the bright white floor, and tall pillars of black stone reached up to support the vaulted glass ceiling, through which the morning sunlight scattered brilliantly across the hall. The scarlet-clad creatures were everywhere—staffing the counters, manning the doors, and scurrying across the hall now and then with purpose.

It was clear now why Petri had elected to come so early. Even though it was just past dawn, there was already a formidable queue of wizards down the centre of the hall.

"Goblins take pleasure in making wizards wait," said Petri as they arrived at the end of the queue. Harry found that remark rather unfair, given that the queue was actually moving at almost a regular walking pace. More wizards and witches were already coming in behind them as they started to advance.

"Why's it so busy?" Harry asked.

"People come when they need money to buy things," said Petri. "It's foolish to carry around more than you need."

"What about chequebooks?" asked Harry.

"What?" asked Petri, looking flummoxed.

"Nevermind," said Harry. Did wizards not use cheques? Customers of Petri's shop had always paid in galleons, sickles, and knuts, and Harry hadn't thought anything of it at the time, but it was a bit odd that even large transactions were done in physical gold.

Despite Petri's complaints, they made it to the front of the queue in just a few minutes. Petri walked up to a free goblin and said, "Good morning. I need a vault transfer from Berlin."

"Your name, sir?" said the goblin, who peered at them with narrowed eyes through a pair of round golden spectacles, not unlike the ones Harry was wearing now.

"Joachim Petri," said Petri, and Harry could not help starting. He glanced back and forth between Petri and the goblin, but neither appeared fazed.

"Key please," said the goblin.

Petri reached into an inner pocket and produced a minuscule golden key, the size of his fingertip, and passed it to the goblin.

The goblin inspected the key. Then he ran a long, thin finger across a roll of parchment, and opened it up, pressing the key against the top of the sheet.

"Vault contents purely monetary. Is that correct?" he asked, after a pause.

"Yes," said Petri.

"An immediate transfer is possible, for a half-percent fee, or you may wait five to ten days for a reduced fee of a quarter-percent," said the goblin.

"Immediate transfer," said Petri, surprising Harry, as he had expected the wizard to balk at the fee. "I'd like to make a withdrawal and an item deposit."

"In order, sir. Would you like to retain the Berlin vault, or close it?" asked the goblin.

"Close it, please," said Petri.

The goblin nodded and made some notes on the parchment with a quill plucked from a jar at the edge of the counter.

"At this time we can offer you a security upgrade for an additional sickle per month," said the goblin.

"No thank you," said Petri evenly. The goblin nodded curtly, and made no further offers.

At length, he rolled up the sheet of parchment and sealed it with a dab of scarlet wax from a long stick. Then he pressed one of his many rings into the wax. He handed the sealed scroll and the golden key to Petri.

"Vault five hundred seventy-two," said the goblin. He glanced around, eyes landing on a particularly tall goblin, about Harry's height, passing by. "Snipseed!" he called, and the tall goblin turned. The counter goblin said something in a guttural, snarling language to Snipseed and waved his hands, clearly indicating that they should follow the other goblin.

"Right this way," said Snipseed, holding open one of the side doors.

It was like stepping into an entirely different world, a cavern of dark stone lit by bare torches. Snipseed ushered them into what appeared to be a mine cart and then clambered in himself. They shot off without warning at high speed. Harry slammed painfully into Petri's trunk with a startled shout, and then found himself thrown against the side of the cart as they turned a sharp corner. He held onto the metal handrail beside him for dear life.

Then they dropped, straight down, and Harry whooped as his hair was swept back from his face. The cart didn't slow down at all as it leveled off, but somehow it was navigating actively. They barreled down the left path of a fork and then swung _upside down_ for the briefest moment, hardly enough to even unseat them but still terrifying. Then they went down a dozen more branching paths, and Harry gave up trying to remember the way and closed his eyes to enjoy the wind whipping through his hair.

All too soon, the ride ended, and they disembarked somewhat stiffly. Petri's curly hair was sticking up every which way, and his pinched expression made him look like a scarecrow. He handed Snipseed his key, and the goblin went ahead to open up the iron door. He inserted the tiny key into a disproportionately huge lock and spun it around several times, like a screwdriver. The lock clicked and began to rotate magically, and the door split open.

The vault was about two metres wide and deep, and completely empty. Harry wasn't sure what he had expected—the magical appearance of money, perhaps? He felt a little silly. The vault had just been opened, so of course there was nothing inside.

Petri stepped inside, set down his trunk, and gestured for Snipseed to join him. Harry hung back and watched from outside. The goblin took the scroll, pried open the seal without breaking it, and unrolled the parchment against the wall, where it stuck. The wax seal seemed to melt into the stone, leaving a reddish engraving.

Snipseed took a red pouch from his waist and opened it before turning it upside down. Golden galleons poured out, clattering against the ground, and quickly began forming a pile. He held the pouch out effortlessly, wearing a bored expression. Harry watched in awe as the pile grew until it was almost taller than the goblin. Then the fountain of gold ended, and Snipseed gave the pouch a few last shakes. A small shower of sickles and knuts fell out and rolled down the hill of galleons.

Snipseed ran his long-fingered hands over the gold, almost caressing it, and it organised itself into neat stacks instead of the haphazard mound it had been before. The sickles and knuts were ejected from the pile and formed their own short stack.

"There you are, sir," said Snipseed, and stepped out of the vault with a short bow.

"Thank you," said Petri. He stepped inside and took half a stack of galleons and all the sickles and knuts, simply transferring the money to his pockets. Then he tipped his trunk over, opened it up to its expanded setting, and began to climb inside. He shot Harry a significant look, as if to tell him to keep watch, in case the goblin did anything unsavoury. Harry kept his eyes on the trunk at first, but after several minutes passed and Petri still had not reemerged, he looked away, bored.

"Er, excuse me, do you have cheques?" he asked Snipseed, remembering his curiosity, but feeling a little foolish even as he asked.

"No sir, no cheques," said Snipseed, grinning toothily. Unlike Petri, he was clearly aware of the concept. "We'd be up to our necks in forgeries if we did."

Harry thought about the potential of transfiguration combined with a flimsy piece of paper, and had to acknowledge the point.

"How do you stop galleons from being forged?" Harry asked, curious.

"They're gold inside," said Snipseed, as if that explained everything. "Want to give it a try?" He pulled a galleon out of a pouch and tossed it upwards before snatching it out of the air rather threateningly. Harry shook his head quickly.

"Er, no thanks," he said, making a note to ask Petri about the significance of gold in this context. Snipseed chuckled, a little unkindly, Harry thought.

There was an awkward pause, during which Harry stared at the trunk again to avoid looking at the goblin. There was still no sign of Petri.

Then Snipseed asked, "Are you interested in accounting?"

"Er, not really," said Harry.

"Really? But you know about cheques," said Snipseed with some incredulity. He smiled slyly. "Say, do you know how to account a ledger?"

"Er, not exactly, no," said Harry. He remembered having done some kind of exercise sheets involving money in maths, but that was the extent of his experience.

"Do you know sums?" Snipseed pressed.

"Well of course," said Harry, a little offended.

"Of course," Snipseed repeated rather sardonically, almost to himself. "Well, I have," he began, but trailed off suddenly, glancing to the side. Harry followed his gaze to where Petri was hauling himself out of the trunk, a wooden chest tucked awkwardly under one arm. He deposited the chest in an empty spot and turned to shut and lock the trunk.

"Have what?" Harry asked, glancing back at Snipseed, but the goblin ignored him rather rudely. Harry supposed he didn't want to talk about whatever it was in front of Petri, which was a bit suspicious.

The ride back to the surface was less exhilarating than the ride down, as they spent much of it going against gravity and feeling like they were about to tip right out of their seats.

"What was that box that you put in the vault?" Harry asked as they left the bank. It was properly morning now, and Diagon Alley was full of activity.

"Documents. Nothing that concerns you," said Petri unhelpfully. They turned onto the far emptier Knockturn quickly enough, and this time the hag with the fingernails did not approach them.

Back in the inn, Petri set down his trunk in the narrow space between the bed and the wall, toward the back of the room where it wasn't easily seen from any oblique angle, and opened it up.

"I need to buy some things from the market. Stay here and practise your series exercises. The severing charm, especially," said Petri, and Harry grimaced at the recurring thought of severing charms and hags.

"Can't I come with you?" he asked, not fancying being cooped up in the tiny room, or the dull antechamber of the trunk.

Petri shook his head and brandished his wand somewhat threateningly in Harry's direction. "When you can cast an enchantment properly, then you can skip exercises. If you must take a break, I suggest you continue reading _Gesang und Rhythmus_. It will help."

Harry flushed at the reminder that he could not yet produce a steadily floating apple, and nodded reluctantly. Petri spelled the door open rather unnecessarily and departed, using magic again to close it behind him.

With nothing in particular to practise his charm on, Harry contemplated the minimally furnished room for a minute before deciding that he could use one of his socks. Slipping out of his ratty trainers, he removed his sock and set it on the floor.

Cutting the sock and repairing it was actually rather easy, and Harry couldn't tell if he was improving. On a whim, he tried to put a hovering enchantment on his sock, but it refused to even remain levitating for a second, falling to the floor the instant his wand motion trailed out of the levitation charm's ending flick. Harry concluded that there was something about apples that lent them better to enchantment, since the other option was that his magical talents had regressed abysmally in the span of a few days.

Harry was down in the trunk and halfway across the antechamber when he remembered that the library was past the blood door. Then he remembered that Rosenkol had apparated straight through whatever ward was on the trunk before.

"Rosenkol," he called out. Rosenkol appeared without a sound, and Harry jumped. Had the elf been there all along?

"Wizardling Harry is wanting to go to the library?" Rosenkol asked, preempting Harry's request.

"Er, yes, please," said Harry. The elf snapped, and a short bout of compression later, they appeared in the pentagonal room. Rosenkol disappeared again before Harry could say anything else, or even thank him.

Harry remembered as he glanced at the shelves that he had no idea where _Gesang und Rhythmus_ actually was, or who had authored it. He sighed and began looking down the nearest row of books, before quickly concluding that it would be impractical to search by brute force.

He was a wizard, and there was definitely some magical way to find the book. The summoning charm, perhaps? He thought it might be right, but did not know the incantation, or any proper wand movements, since Petri always cast it nonverbally and with very little apparent effort, probably because he used it every day of his adult life.

The _Complete Compendium_ would have it, though, and Harry spotted the gigantic volume easily towards the end of one of the shelves. It was after Z, which was logical, as it had been compiled and was maintained by a long list of witches and wizards rather than a single author.

Only the English copy was in the library. Harry guessed that the German one was upstairs in the workroom as a reference. This suited him just fine, and he tapped the blank first leaf with his wand and said, "Summoning Charm."

The pages flipped on their own until the book was open to the right section.

" _Accio_ ," Harry said, following the pronunciation guide. The entry said that the spell was either twirl-durative or arc-perfective, depending on whether it was a summoning for an object by line of sight or by name.

" _Accio Gesang und Rhythmus,_ " he said, moving his wand in an small arc as shown in the diagram. The movement felt awkward. Nothing happened. He tried a few more times, trying to focus on what he remembered the book looked like, but he had no idea whether the copy in this library was the same as the one he had read in the tent.

Then he saw one of the shelves shake slightly, and hurried over to it to investigate. Up on the second shelf, just above Harry's head, was a protruding spine. He craned his neck to see the title and was pleased to find the target of his spell.

So his summoning charm needed serious work, but it had done its job. He reached up to take the book, but then paused.

"Adalbert Waffling," it said beside the title, and Harry saw the name repeated over half the shelf. Adalbert Waffling had apparently written a great many books. More importantly, most of the titles were in English, suggesting that he had only been reading a translation.

He quickly glanced across the collection to see if he could find an English copy of the book. There was _Magical Theory_ , at least six different editions of it scattered about, _Principles of Magic_ and what was probably the same thing but in Latin, _Irony is Behovely,_ and next to that _Chant and Cadence_. Harry grabbed the last from the shelf, fairly certain that this was the right book.

Harry was quickly disappointed to find that, though in English he knew most of the words for a change, the book was still mostly incomprehensible. He did finally understand that "chant" or "Gesang" was a general category including normal incantations, and "cadence" or "Rhythmus" referred to wand movements, something which cleared up previous confusion regarding Petri's explanations.

He could also see that the book was supposed to explain how incantations and wand movements worked, but the complicated magical diagrams and the discussion about "memetic stabilisation" did not do much to enlighten him.

Harry became briefly aware that he had read the same sentence three times without comprehending a word of it, before an attempt to give up and move to the next phrase resulted in him slumping over the book, fast asleep.

He awoke to a grinding sound, and spent a moment completely bewildered. Then he tried to straighten up to look around and was rewarded with a sharp pain lancing through his stiff neck. Rubbing his nape gingerly, he turned his head to see the platform descending from above, carrying Petri. Harry quickly smoothed out the slightly crumpled page he had fallen asleep on and pretended to have been reading.

Petri was not fooled, and only smirked. He twirled his wand and summoned the book right out of Harry's grasp, glanced it at briefly, and then banished it back to its place on the shelf.

"If you are tired, I recommend sleeping on the bed," he said. "We will be visiting the vampire again later tonight."

"Are we really going to be living in a coffin?" Harry asked, having received no satisfactory answer the last time.

They were really going to be living in a coffin.

Silviu's selection of coffins for living in, as opposed to being dead in, was in the back of the shop. Each coffin essentially served as a trap door, with stairs down into a small rectangular room three meters deep and about four wide.

"Only vampires are legally allowed to live in these," Silviu told them as Petri examined the interior of a mahogany coffin with a floating yellow tape measure that Harry assumed he had acquired on his trip to the market earlier that day. What exactly he was measuring was unclear, as the tape measure contorted itself into a variety of shapes while Petri nodded and muttered to himself.

"Why?" Harry asked.

"It's a portable permanent dwelling," said Silviu. "Vampire coffins are one of the only exceptions to the law against them. And even then you still need an official address."

Harry nodded as if he understood. This law explained why most wizards did not live in tents or trunks, but it still did not explain why Petri, who only seemed to care about obeying the law when it suited his purposes, did not just live in his trunk. In fact, Harry did not see the difference between this expanded coffin and the trunk. If anything, the trunk was better.

"I like this model," said Petri, tapping a light, unvarnished rectangular casket which, according to its informational sign, was pine, just like his false wand.

"There's only one of those available. Plot D-12," said Silviu, consulting a scroll of parchment. "Shall we go look at the property?"

"Yes, let's," Petri agreed.

"There's a floo address, but if you don't mind, it would be better for us to walk there," said Silviu.

Petri nodded and gestured for him to lead the way.

"As I understand it, you've just moved to England, yes?" asked Silviu as they exited the Coffin House.

Petri nodded.

"You still have ten or so days to register yourself," said Silviu. "I can't let you sign the lease if you don't. Will you be able to do it?"

"Of course. Half vampire, from the Black Forest," said Petri.

Silviu snorted, turning to look him up and down as they walked. "Well, it could work, if you bled yourself beforehand."

"I will keep that in mind," said Petri. Harry couldn't tell if either of them was serious.

They walked deeper into the alley, far past the White Wyvern. The closely clustered shops gave way to taller buildings with more space around them. Any exposed land was covered by a single kind of sprawling, bright green plant which threatened to spread all over the uneven cobblestone road from where it burst out of the cracks.

Silviu stopped before a wrought iron gate at the head of a long stretch of brick wall. It was chained shut. He tapped his wand against the chains and they slithered apart, allowing him to push open the gate.

"There's also a password, if you prefer," he said. "It changes every fortnight but right now it's Edgar Stroulger."

"The sneakoscope inventor?" asked Petri.

"It might be," asked Silviu. "Well, he's buried here. We rotate through everyone's names in alphabetical order."

The wild growth of the strange plant stopped at the edge where it met regular grass. There wasn't much of a proper road past the gate, only a well-trodden footpath. A copse of thick, gnarled yew trees obscured everything to the left, while the wall continued to the right parallel to the path.

It was only past the yew trees that the gravestones were finally visible, rows upon rows, unevenly spaced and at varying heights. Harry noticed at the back of the cemetery two adjacent mausoleums in very different styles, one all sharp corners and the other elegant miniature spires.

Silviu soon led them off the side path and between the gravestones. It could have been Harry's imagination, but he thought the vampire was very deliberately avoiding the ones adorned with crosses. Though they dotted the cemetery here and there, there weren't enough of them to be sure.

They passed by a rather dilapidated shack, which Silviu pointed to. "The floo is in there," he explained, "and there are some owls you can rent."

Behind the shack there were more gravestones, but these were very uniform, and instead of empty plots each stood at the head of a half-buried coffin. Harry guessed that these were the "coffin houses." He noted a morbid parallel to muggle suburbia in the orderly arrangement and the availability of only a few coffin models. Several of the plots were even planted full of flowers, like miniature gardens. One of them hosted a gigantic plant which was moving very slightly and appeared to have multiple fanged mouths.

"D-12, here," said Silviu, stopping in front of a pine coffin which had been set in a shallow pit. "We fill this with the soil of your homeland," he explained. "But I suppose local soil will do for you?"

He sounded rather contemptuous, but Petri said, with all politeness, "Yes, that will be fine."

"You'll take it then?" asked Silviu. "The rent is twenty galleons a month, and the deposit is a month's rent. You can make any reversible modifications as long as they stay on your plot."

Harry glanced at the headstone and saw that it simply said the address, "66 Knockturn Alley, Plot D-12."

Silviu noticed the direction of his gaze and added, "You can also put your name on the stone, but that's at your own expense."

Harry couldn't see why anyone alive would want to put their name on a tombstone right where they slept. Then again, the fact that Petri was apparently fine with living in a graveyard, surrounded by vampires, was also beyond Harry's comprehension.

Indeed, Petri agreed to the lease without asking too many questions. Silviu matched Petri's wand to the coffin—it was the false wand, Harry noted—and also gave him pair of metal charms that apparently served as house keys that slotted into a groove on the casket lid. Petri handed him a stack of galleons in return, and they settled the paperwork with an honourable oath.

Silviu left them to investigate their new home. Petri opened up the casket and descended, and Harry followed with some trepidation.

It looked normal inside, just as it had in the shop, with wooden walls and flooring, and Harry could almost convince himself that they were in a regular basement rather than inside a casket. The space was a little cramped for two, but on a similar scale to their room at the White Wyvern. Harry was sure that Petri had designs involving expansion charms, anyway.

"We will sleep at the inn and move in tomorrow," said Petri. Harry was glad to hear it. In the darkness, Harry felt a faint stirring of claustrophobia, though he quashed it immediately. He had slept in a similarly dark cupboard for eight years. Compared to that, this expanded casket was luxurious.

They returned the next morning by floo, trunk and tent in tow. Petri left the tent outside, but carried the trunk down the steps.

"Why didn't we just live in the trunk?" Harry finally asked. "Or some other place. Silviu mentioned some other streets."

"This place will be more than sufficient with the right enchantments," Petri said. He had produced his strange tape measure again and it zoomed around the room making esoteric measurements.

"Okay, but why?" Harry pressed.

"It would be highly unsafe to live inside a _trunk_ ," said Petri with an air of impatience. "A place can be protected, only if it does not move. A trunk is made for moving."

"The tent then?" Harry asked.

"We have been living in the tent," said Petri, "in the forest. The whole reason for moving was to leave the forest."

"But we're in a graveyard now," said Harry, not seeing how that was better.

"We are in the centre of Wizarding Britain," Petri corrected. "And before you ask, I believe that Diagon Alley and Carkitt Market are some of the most expensive places in the country."

"Oh," said Harry.

"Help me move the furniture from the tent," Petri said.

The tent couldn't go inside the coffin because of the undetectable extension charm, so they had to set it up outside and move the contents manually.

Harry looked around nervously. They were encroaching rather egregiously on the cemetery proper. The tent wasn't enormous, but it was definitely too big to fit between the tombstones, so Petri had put it on the path. A wizard in purple robes was coming towards them from the shack with the floo, a clear scowl on his face.

"Hey, have some respect. This is a cemetery! No camping here," he yelled.

Petri did not even turn around, and the angry wizard came closer. Harry glanced back and forth between them, feeling a nervous pit forming in his stomach.

Without warning, Petri whirled around with his wand out and cried, " _Confundo!_ " His face was screwed up in concentration. There was no flash of light or anything, and Harry wondered if the spell had failed and the purple-robed wizard was just going to get angrier, but then the man stumbled mid-step and nearly fell over, barely catching himself.

"Wha—hello? Oh, good day, mister," he said, sounding very dazed.

"Good morning," said Petri, casually shifting his wand hand behind him and out of sight. "You were just going that way," he said, pointing the opposite direction.

"Oh, yes, right," the wizard said, and wandered off.

"You can just mess with people like that?" Harry demanded.

"It's a very difficult charm," said Petri, looking pleased, "but useful."

He ducked into the tent, and Harry followed quickly. Inside, Petri was casting the shrinking charm at everything in reach. Harry bent down to pick up a miniature table, using his other hand to grab all four of its chairs. They weighed exactly as much as he might have expected from objects of that size, and were perfectly manageable.

It took a dozen trips to move all the large furniture in shrunken form, with the exception of the contents of Petri's office. He had brought his trunk inside and was transferring most of the things from his desk to another compartment of the trunk that looked similar to the one full of glass items.

Once the tent was emptied out, Petri began to cast spells at it in sequence, under his breath. Harry knew enough now to recognise it as an enchantment of some sort. Once he finished, he peered inside the tent momentarily, nodded to himself, and then used his wand to conduct its disassembly.

Then he walked into their casket home with the folded tent. There was no ensuing explosion, so Harry assumed that he had removed the extension charm.

Petri ignored the haphazard pile of shrunken furniture in the corner and was waving his wand in concert with the animated tape measure.

"It would be easier to remove the extension charm and cast another one," he said.

"Should I take all the furniture out?" Harry asked.

Petri glanced at him as if startled that he was there and said, "No, no. I shall add to the charm."

"What is the tape measure for?" Harry asked.

"It shows how space has been extended," Petri explained. "It is very unlikely to see a perfect extension charm with even extension everywhere, so one must be careful."

Harry watched as Petri traversed every inch of the room accompanied by the tape measure.

"Here, I believe," he murmured in German, stopping about a third of the way between the two longer walls. He said a long incantation, and made a pushing motion with his wand and other hand in concert, and the wall moved back about a foot. He then meticulously measured all over the new space, talking to himself as he went. Harry backed away as far as he could and sat down in a corner.

He slipped his hands into his robe pockets and his fingertips brushed something unexpectedly cool and smooth. It was the house key. He pulled it out and studied the thin but unyielding metal disc. There were a series of small, differently-sized holes punched into it. Harry could not even begin to guess how it worked.

Petri managed in the end to extend all the walls about two meters, resulting in very spacious single room. He then carefully shrank the distance between two patches of wall to separate the space into two rooms with rather round corners, one large and one small. Apparently, sharpening the bend was a difficult task, because he made scant progress after attempting it for several minutes and then appeared to give up.

He installed the toilet from the tent in the smaller room. There was no plumbing to speak of, as the camp toilet was simply a large bowl that vanished whatever was put into it when the appropriate spot was tapped. In Harry's opinion this was better than a regular toilet, as it required very little cleaning. On the other hand there was no shower either, only the scouring spell. Aunt Petunia had never let him take long showers, anyway, so he didn't mind too much, but the spell always left a bitter, soapy taste in Harry's mouth afterwards.

There wasn't nearly enough space for all the furniture from the tent, so Petri only restored their beds, the kitchen table and its chairs, and the stasis box for their food. The rest of the things he stowed in the front room of the trunk. He then used one of Rosenkol's collection of funeral shrouds as a curtain for the toilet, and made another only marginally successful attempt at sharpening the corners of the room. With that, he considered them sufficiently settled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Behold the pattern I found from my amazing sample size of three! Flitwick, Griphook, and Gringott are all probably goblin surnames, and they consist of a four-letter verb and a four-letter noun smashed together. So that's how I will do it. Also, Gringotts appears to be a safety deposit box service rather than a bank as we muggles would consider it. The fact that wizards still use metal currency with intrinsic value rather limits the potential for complicated financial instruments. I have many thoughts about the wizarding economy.


	17. Banker

Petri was somehow convinced that Silviu or one of their other vampire neighbours was going to suck out all of Harry's blood and chop him to pieces the moment he was left unattended. As a result, Harry wasn't allowed to go outside on his own.

It was the tent all over again, but worse, because he hadn't been interested in the gloomy forest, but there were things to see in Knockturn Alley and beyond. It was just as Petri had said—they were in the centre of Wizarding Britain.

Harry doubted that any of the vampires in the vicinity even knew that Harry existed. He wasn't sure they knew that _Petri_ existed, except that for some reason Petri had engraved his fake name, Jochen Peters, on the headstone to mark his presence. He had done this himself by repeatedly casting a spell with the incantation, " _defodio,_ " which had left deep gouges in the stone and which Harry had resolved not to get on the wrong end of.

Petri always went out during the day, even though he was pretending to be a vampire. Half vampires could and did go out in the sun, but they were still supposed to prefer the darkness. Direct sunlight could result in blurry vision, slow reaction time, and general fatigue, all of which sounded bad.

Harry had researched these things after Petri had appeared to fail so utterly in behaving like a vampire that Harry thought his own assumptions (mostly a result of overheard conversations at school, as Aunt Petunia had never allowed abnormal things like fantasy fiction into her home) must be wrong. They had been more or less accurate, however, leaving it to the imagination how Petri had convinced the Ministry of Magic of the whole charade in the first place.

It was likely that the substantial amount of blood Petri had extracted and put into a jar beforehand, which left him with a starkly anaemic appearance, had helped. He had also cast a charm on his canine teeth to make them permanently longer, which Harry found unsettling.

Harry had been surprised that Petri was willing to go around parading as a creature, given his generally disdainful opinion of non-humans, but apparently half vampires were viewed in a relatively favourable light by most wizards and witches. It was like the difference between a wolf and a dog. No wonder Silviu pretended he was one as well.

Harry wondered if the vampire even still remembered him. They hadn't come into contact for a few months. Whenever Petri took Harry outside with him, they would floo straight to the Leaky Cauldron in Diagon Alley or the Hopping Pot in Carkitt Market, bypassing Knockturn Alley entirely, and floo back when their business was done.

Petri never did anything interesting either, at least when he brought Harry along. He would withdraw funds from Gringotts and buy things, usually books or extra parchment and quills. It was all very mundane.

Today was Christmas Day, and Harry had somehow deluded himself into thinking that Petri would break the pattern for once and do something fun. However, he was sorely disappointed, as they apparated to the Diagon Alley entrance (the Leaky Cauldron was closed for the day) and trudged through the thick snow to get to the bank. The snow was new; it must have stormed something fierce since his last venture outside. Harry's trainers were highly unsuitable for the terrain and became sodden and cold with seconds.

"There's snow in my shoes," Harry said.

Petri cast a warming charm and an _impervius_ charm at his feet, which resulted in warm, but still wet, trainers. Harry supposed that he would take what he could get.

Gringotts was open as usual, as the goblins did not observe human holidays. They were closed only one day of the year, and that day had been several weeks ago, at the beginning of December.

Snipseed took them down to Petri's vault. Half the time it was Snipseed, and the rest of the time it was a surly, squat goblin named Turnlink. Harry supposed the cart operators were assigned to particular doors. Harry did not particularly like either goblin—Snipseed was smarmy and seemed too interested in Harry, though what kind of interest it was, he was still uncertain, while Turnlink was always as disdainful as possible without being outright rude.

This time, in addition to withdrawing several galleons, Petri deposited a slip of parchment into his mysterious wooden chest. He hadn't lied about the contents; Harry could see that it was full of documents, but there was no way to determine what kind of documents they were from a distance.

Harry wondered what Petri planned to do with the money he had just withdrawn, given that practically nothing was open.

"I have a meeting on the Continent," Petri said as they left the bank. A meeting, on Christmas Day? Harry made a face. "Regretfully, I need my equipment, so there is nowhere for you to practise. And since it's… a holiday, I thought you could take a break. Don't leave Diagon Alley, and don't get up to mischief. I'll be back in three hours. Meet me here, in front of Gringotts."

Harry blinked, wondering if he had hallucinated that speech. Was Petri really going to leave him alone in Diagon Alley? Harry quickly smoothed his face as Petri seemed already to be having second thoughts about the decision.

"If something happens, if there's some emergency," Petri began, rummaging around in his pocket. He pulled out a quill and cast some kind of nonverbal spell with a very complicated wand motion, duplicating the quill. Then he handed the duplicate to Harry. "Break this and I'll know. Just if it's an _emergency_ , and you can't call the aurors."

"Right," said Harry, nodding to show that he understood. Petri was being paranoid again. If there was an emergency where he couldn't call the aurors, that meant he had lost his wand, which Harry thought would be unlikely.

Petri disapparated without saying anything more, and Harry broke out into a momentary grin.

His face fell when he realised that yes, it was Christmas Day, and as he had observed before, practically everything was closed. Other people were home celebrating with their families. Harry was out in the snow by himself because his only remaining family hated him and his guardian did not have an ounce of celebratory spirit.

With a sigh, he sat down on the magically clear and dry steps of Gringotts. He eyed the door goblin carefully in his peripheral vision, but there was no reaction suggesting that he ought not to loiter, so he relaxed.

The Alley wasn't completely deserted by any means. Wizards and witches walked by occasionally, wrapped in thick winter cloaks. Harry stood up when he noticed he couldn't feel his fingers or face any more. The warming charm must be wearing off, but he didn't know how to cast another one.

Curious as to where passers-by were heading, and hoping for somewhere to warm up, he followed the footprints in the snow, nearly all of which led deeper into the Alley and away from the closed Leaky Cauldron.

A number of tracks converged at the post office, which was open. He ducked inside to get away from the cold for a moment. It was chaotic and smelly, and packed with owls of all shapes and sizes, like always. He had visited a few times with Petri, when there were packages to be posted that were too big for the rental owls at 66 Knockturn.

Harry wandered over to the stationery, as if he were considering writing a letter. He didn't have any money to speak of, but he didn't want to be kicked out for just standing around.

The single cashier was not paying him any mind at the moment, as he was advising a middle-aged witch on what kind of owl to use for her oddly-shaped package.

"The Great Gray would be the best," he said, but the witch shook her head.

"That huge thing?" she said, "No, no, little Artie would run off screaming seeing that. Couldn't we do two of the spotted ones?"

"Ma'am, it's not the right shape for two owls..."

Harry glanced over to the side with the smaller owls and did a double take. What he had at first supposed was another boy around his age was actually a goblin, and a very familiar goblin at that.

"Snipseed," he called out, wondering how the goblin had got from inside Gringotts to the post office without passing him at all. Snipseed was wearing a heavy black cloak over his scarlet uniform, which made him look almost wizard-like.

The goblin turned jerkily at the sound of his name, not spotting Harry for a moment.

"Snipseed," Harry said again, and the goblin looked in the right place this time.

"Ah, hello, young man," he greeted. His eyes were darting left and right, and he seemed very distracted.

"My name's Harry," said Harry.

"Harry. Call me Nalrod," said Snipseed. "Where's five seventy-two? That is, your… father?"

"No, my master," Harry corrected. Nalrod; was that the goblin's first name then? "He's around, doing business," he said vaguely, not really wanting Nalrod to know that he was alone. He thought it would be rude to ask the goblin outright what he was doing here, so he tried, "Are you on a lunch break?"

"Ah, yes, well, no, not exactly. I'm sending letters," Nalrod said, holding up an envelope in his long-fingered hands.

"Well, yes, I figured," said Harry. That was the assumption, in a post office.

"Say," Nalrod began, his eyes finally fixing on Harry, "Humans give gifts on this day, right?"

Harry nodded. "Usually," he said. He had never received a Christmas present in his life, but he had seen Dudley get more than his fair share of them.

"What kinds of gifts?" Nalrod asked.

A little mystified at this line of questioning, but seeing no harm in it, Harry said, "Any kind, really. Whatever you think the other person likes." He wasn't sure if that was right, seeing as he had little experience with the matter, but he'd never seen evidence to the contrary given Dudley's wide variety of receipts.

"But how do you know which is right?" asked the goblin, now intensely focused. He leaned forward suddenly, and Harry shrank back, a little intimidated.

"Well, you don't know for sure, I guess. But if it's a friend you probably have ideas, right? I don't know, sorry," he said. Nalrod slumped a little, but then straightened again momentarily.

"She likes flowers, but it's winter," he said.

Harry thought about the matter seriously. "Goblins are good with metal, right?"

"Of course," said Nalrod a little stiffly, "we are masters in the art."

"So maybe jewellery, like a pin or a small necklace, with flowers," Harry suggested, drawing on his meagre experience with women, which basically amounted to Aunt Petunia. She liked flowers too, and jewellery, but not the flamboyant kind, like the giant bangles Mrs. Number 7 wore—that was "tawdry."

"It's not too forward?" Nalrod asked, looking uncertain.

"Forward?" Harry repeated.

"She won't think I'm proposing marriage?" said Nalrod.

"What?" said Harry. "No, er, I don't think so. Is that how goblins propose?"

"With a gift of jewellery, yes," said Nalrod.

"Actually, come to think of it, that's how, er, humans propose too, but it has to be a ring, I think. So no rings, and I reckon it should be fine," said Harry. "Just something simple."

Nalrod nodded slowly, deep in thought. Then he shook himself. "Thank you for the advice." He reached into his robe pocket and took out a handful of sickles. Then, with a wiggle of his long fingers, the sickles seemed to melt together and flow, forming a silver hairpin which then sprouted tiny, intricate floral designs.

"How is this?" he asked a little fretfully, "I don't have any jewels."

"That was wicked," said Harry, somewhat in awe at the casual display of transformative magic. "It looks great. Er, is it okay for you to melt money like that?"

"No one will notice," he said evasively. He looked at the pin he had made, and then at the letter in his hand. "Is it too impersonal to send it by post? I wish I could go myself."

"Can't you go after work?" Harry asked, supposing that the goblin's lunch break was about up.

"She lives in Knockturn Alley," said Nalrod. "It's against the treaty for me to leave Gringotts except on business. I had to volunteer to send vault summaries to come here." He grimaced.

"Oh," said Harry, feeling rather bad for the goblin. "I live in Knockturn. I could go deliver it for you." He regretted it as soon as he said it. He didn't really want to go on the errand, and he imagined it would be awkward to deliver a present to a woman he'd never met. Also, Petri obviously did not want him wandering around Knockturn, and even if he was being paranoid about vampires, Harry himself was still rather leery of hags and the prospect of having to cut off someone's head, even in self-defence.

Fortunately, Nalrod was shaking his head. "No, no, I might as well use an owl. But, say, are you going to be here for long?"

"Here, in Diagon?" Harry asked. Nalrod nodded. "Another few hours."

"May I borrow your face? It would be an hour at most," said Nalrod.

"What?" Harry asked, reaching up to touch his face, as if to reassure himself that it was still there. "Borrow my face?"

"It's a bit of sympathetic transformation," said Nalrod, which told Harry approximately nothing. "We'll just trade appearances for a bit, so that I can walk there myself."

"Oh," said Harry. "But I'd have to stay at Gringotts?"

"Ah, well, yes. Sorry, it was wrong of me to suggest it," said Nalrod, backing up a step and looking away. He didn't sound sorry at all, only bitterly disappointed. Harry's face fell.

"If it's only for an hour," he said, still a little hesitant, but Nalrod's tentative, hopeful smile was too much for him to take it back.

"I'll be quick," he said. He glanced around. "Let's not do this here. Follow me."

They exited the post office and were struck with a blast of cold air. It felt refreshing for a moment before it began to seep through Harry's robe. The warming charm had long worn off, and despite his efforts at watching where he stepped chunks of ice worked its way into his trainers again and he gave up on attempting to stay dry.

The goblin at the door looked at them askance as they passed by and shouted something in the goblin language, chuckling nastily afterwards. Nalrod flushed and sneered, baring his sharp teeth.

"What do I do if someone tries to talk to me in—in your language?" Harry hissed urgently.

"Tell them, ' _khrast_!' It means something like, 'shut up,' but, well, more forceful. Don't worry; we bankers mostly speak English," Nalrod said.

" _Khrast_ ," Harry tried to say, but it sounded weak coming out of his mouth. Nalrod snorted slightly, which was hardly reassuring.

They passed the main entrance and walked up to the wall. Suddenly, Harry noticed a door behind one of the pillars which he could have sworn had not been there before. Nalrod ran a sharp nail down the crack in the centre and the door melted away. He ushered Harry inside.

It was a rock tunnel lit by torches, not unlike the tunnels that led to the vaults, but there was no track. Instead, they were at the top of a set of curved stairs that led downwards.

They went down the stairs, which spiraled deep into the bowels of the earth. They passed three landings before exiting on the next one into another torch-lit tunnel. The goblin whistled, and a mine cart trundled up to meet them.

"You should be able to summon these by whistling, too," said Nalrod.

"I can't whistle," said Harry worriedly.

"Try it," said Nalrod, and Harry pursed his lips and tried to make some sound come out.

They clambered in the cart before he managed anything, and it shot off at a breakneck pace, stopping soon in a large cavern with many branching little tunnels. Harry continued his efforts.

"Curl your tongue," Nalrod suggested, as he led Harry down one of the tunnels. They emerged in a store room full of crates. Nalrod heaved the lid off the nearest one, revealing folded Gringotts uniforms.

Harry produced a weak whistle.

"Good enough," said Nalrod. "You're the right size, so these should fit."

Harry picked a uniform from the top and Nalrod turned away to let him put it on. It looked intricate, but it was really just a pair of trousers and long buttoned shirt with things sewn all over it. The shirt was a little tight on Harry, but even as he had the thought it seemed to expand to give his arms more room.

"Done," he said, tucking his robes behind the crate for later retrieval. He remembered to take his wand and put it into his back pocket.

Nalrod turned to Harry and reached out with his hands. "May I?"

Harry, feeling some trepidation now, gave a jerky nod. Nalrod touched his face, and Harry closed his eyes, waiting for something to happen. He didn't feel anything, but when he opened his eyes it was like looking into a mirror, but wrong—his own face, almost, was staring back at him. His eyes darted to the smooth brow and the black hair. There was no lightning-bolt scar peeking through his fringe, and it looked like the cosmetic charm Petri had put on his hair did not transfer, but everything else was the same.

Suddenly self-conscious, he reached up touch his face and felt wrinkles there, and prickly stubble at his chin. His hair was thick and wiry, he could see his nose, large and protruding, out of the corner of his eye. Reflexively he smoothed down his fringe to cover up the scar that he guessed was still on his forehead.

"It worked?" he asked.

Nalrod nodded, and untied the sash around his waist, which contained several pouches. He helped Harry put it on. "This one is the vault balancer," he said, pointing to the largest one. "It'll restore the right amount to a vault if it's missing anything. Just loose money in this one. That one has the ledger for all my vaults. Update it if somebody withdraws or deposits an object. The balance will update on its own."

"Okay," Harry agreed, even though he felt very out of his depth.

"Let's go up to the bank," said Nalrod.

They retraced their steps, and Harry tried to whistle again. A few thin, half-hearted notes came out, but he heard the trundling of wheels. Apparently, that had been enough.

"How do you steer this?" he asked.

"You don't," said Nalrod. "It knows where you need to be. It should respond to you, since you have my magic on you now."

They got in, Harry at the helm this time. Just as he wondered how he was supposed to make it go, it started to move, and he nearly fell off his seat. Nalrod snickered, though the sound was quickly swallowed by the wind.

Harry gave a small whoop as they rounded the bend and shot upwards almost vertically, before straightening out and came to a rather abrupt stop. The track had ended before one of the doors that Harry supposed led to the main hall. They climbed out of the cart, and Nalrod made an "after you" gesture. Harry opened the door and they exited.

"Nalrod?" said a goblin on the other side, looking surprised. It was Turnlink. Harry glanced at Nalrod, but then realised that Turnlink was talking to him, obviously because he was wearing Nalrod's face.

"That's Gornuk 'the Grouchy' Turnlink," Nalrod hissed in his ear as he passed behind. Harry's lips twitched involuntarily at the entirely accurate moniker.

"When did you get back?" Gornuk asked.

"Er, just now," said Harry. Nalrod, pretending to be an oblivious human, walked away from them without looking back. Harry's heart leapt into his throat as nerves he previously had been unaware of suddenly hit him all at once. His too-short hands curled into fists. Was this really going to work?

"You were gone forever," said Gornuk, sneering. He said something obviously unfavourable in the goblin language.

"Kh-khrast," said Harry, his face heating and cooling rapidly as it tried to decide between flushing in embarrassment and blanching in panic at his failure to sound at all menacing. It finally settled on the latter as a worried pit formed in his stomach. Nalrod's voice was relatively high-pitched, but Harry didn't think it was high enough to match his own.

Gornuk looked offended for a moment, and Harry grew even more worried that Nalrod had given him the wrong advice, but then the goblin snorted and looked away.

"Turnlink!" a goblin at the counter shouted, and Gornuk had to go take a witch to her vault. Harry breathed out deeply in relief at the reprieve.

He glanced around and was pleased to see that nobody was paying him any mind. Gringotts was much emptier than he was used to seeing. There was no queue, and goblins crossed the hall at a sedate pace, rather than the usual rush.

"Snipseed!" said the goblin at the counter, and Harry responded at a delay, remembering that that was supposed to be his name. He looked up, expecting to see a customer, but there was nobody waiting to go to a vault.

"There you are. Vault seven thirteen needs to be set up. Maximum security, keyless lock," said the goblin. He tossed a scroll to Harry, who managed to snatch it out of the air before it hit his face.

"Er, right," said Harry faintly. The goblin turned away at his acknowledgement, and Harry opened the door and went into the tunnel. What was he supposed to do now? He hadn't the faintest idea how to actually do Nalrod's job, beyond riding the cart, and this vault setup sounded complicated and important.

Well, he needed to go there first. Perhaps he could stall until the real Nalrod returned. He whistled, getting it on the first try this time, and waited for a cart to arrive.

Arrive it did, laden with Gornuk and the witch. They disembarked and Gornuk ignored him professionally, bowing the witch out the door.

"Where are you going?" he asked, once she was out of sight.

"Er, vault setup," Harry said.

"For whom?" Gornuk asked.

"Dunno," said Harry, feeling increasingly awkward. Gornuk looked at him oddly, and glanced down.

"Where's the key?" he asked. Harry tried surreptitiously to move his hands behind his back to hide his human fingers.

"It's keyless," said Harry. This seemed to clear everything up, because Gornuk nodded and leaned back.

"Oh, you could've said," he said, losing interest. Harry decided to get in the cart before the goblin could try to start another conversation. The cart seemed to sense his urgency, because it took off as soon as his bottom managed to touch the seat, and he had to flail wildly to grab a hold of the railing.

The ride ended sooner than he had expected, given that 713 was a bigger number than 572, Petri's vault. But the cart had not gone to vault 713 at all—it had taken a turn and stopped in front of a square hole in the wall which appeared to be a window into a booth where a bored-looking goblin leaned against a counter.

"What do you need?" asked the goblin, who had a squeaky voice and looked a bit different from the other goblins Harry had seen. He tried not to stare as he attempted to figure out what was off.

"Er, I'm going to set up a vault with a keyless lock," he said, since the keyless part appeared to be important.

"Okay," said the goblin. "Wait here while I get a locksmith."

The goblin turned around, a long braid swishing behind him—her. Harry finally realised that the goblin was a girl, the first he had seen. He felt a little silly that he had previously assumed all goblins were male. That didn't even make any sense.

Or was it not so silly after all? Suddenly he was reminded of how all hags seemed to be female. Were there male hags that he just had not encountered? He resolved to ask Petri or look in a magical creatures book later.

The booth goblin returned, waving her hand, and the cart lurched forward a few meters, coming to a stop in front of a tunnel opening where another goblin was approaching.

"Hey, Nalrod, right?" asked the goblin, this one male. Harry cursed his luck at meeting someone who apparently knew Nalrod.

"Er, yeah," he said awkwardly. The goblin grinned at him as he climbed into the cart.

"Fulnok Flitwick. You probably don't remember me, but I was in your accounting class in the academy for a bit before I dropped out to do full crafts," he said.

"Oh," said Harry, not sure what to say to that. Fortunately, the cart picked up speed and made it virtually impossible to talk as they suddenly began to dive straight down.

They were practically in free-fall, and it lasted an eternity. Harry's stomach slammed rudely back into place as they hit the bottom of the descent and shot through a dizzying network of twisting tunnels.

" _Khora!_ " Fulnok shouted. "This is deep."

The cart stopped abruptly and they almost flew out of it. Harry managed to fall out onto the platform instead of the tracks, while Fulnok's face slammed into edge of the cart.

" _Khora_ ," he yelled again, leading Harry to assume that it was some kind of swear word. "This thing needs to be fixed." He climbed out of the cart and gave it a good kick.

"Er, that might just make it worse," said Harry.

Fulnok sniffed. "Whatever. Which vault is it?" he asked.

"Seven thirteen," said Harry. Fulnok moved briskly toward the row of doors at the back of the platform. He put his hands on the vault door and the lock began to warp and melt, the molten metal trickling both towards the ground and the ceiling. It broke off into two rivulets, leaving a jagged crack.

"Well, it could look better, but who cares," said Fulnok. He drummed his fingers against the door here and there, seemingly at random, and then stepped back. "Done. That's the door security. Make sure you don't touch anything outside of here," at this, Fulnok gestured along the crack, "and sympathetic magic only."

"Er, right. That was fast," said Harry.

"Yeah, good luck with the rest of the stuff," said Fulnok, smirking. "It was nice meeting you again."

"Yeah," said Harry, realising that Fulnok was about to leave. "Bye."

The goblin climbed into the cart and disappeared. Harry turned to the vault with a sigh. He had no idea what he was supposed to do.

He looked down at the scroll in his hand. Back when Petri had first opened his vault, Nalrod had opened the scroll and stuck it to the wall somehow, inside the vault, so presumably Harry needed to get in. But how was he supposed to do that?

Fulnok had said not to touch anything besides the crack, suggesting that he ought to touch the crack. Cautiously, Harry reached out and ran a finger along it, like he remembered Nalrod had done to get into Gringotts from the side door.

The world shifted and lurched, and Harry found himself pitching forward onto the floor. He picked himself up, rubbing his bruised jaw and glancing around in surprise. He was inside the vault! Fortunately, it was lit from above by some kind of enchantment, and he could see just fine. He glanced behind him and saw a solid iron slab of a door, still closed. That was a little worrying, but he put the matter aside for now.

Carefully, he broke the seal on the parchment scroll unfurled it. It appeared to be blank, which was unhelpful. He looked around for some place to stick it, but there was no obviously designated spot. He then simply tried pressing it against the wall somewhere. Nothing happened.

This task probably required goblin magic. Remembering what Nalrod had said about Harry now having some of his magic, enough to operate the cart, Harry tried something that felt rather stupid—he leaned forward and pushed the seal against the wall using his nose, which, after all, was currently Nalrod's nose.

To his surprise, this actually worked. The seal melted into the wall the way he remembered, and when he smoothed out the parchment it stuck to the wall as well. Bemused, Harry looked at the words which had sprouted on the page. It was complete gibberish, full of unrecognisable symbols. Harry guessed it was the goblin language, but that did not help him at all.

Scowling, he turned away from the page. He hadn't signed up to do Nalrod's job for him in addition to letting him use his human face. The goblin could set up the vault properly when he came back. Harry would just go back up to the surface to wait for him.

Decision made, Harry faced the door and paused. How was he supposed to open it from this side? He reached out with his hands and tried to touch it where he thought the crack was on the other side, but nothing happened. He tried the same thing with his nose. A little bit of anxiety began to seize his chest. He patted the door, as if there might be some secret invisible switch. Nothing.

His breath quickened, and he bit his lip. There was no reason to panic. He was just missing something obvious.

Despite his attempts to calm himself, however, no new course of action came to mind, and the knot in his chest grew ever larger and threatened to choke him.

He was trapped.


	18. Trespasser

Harry lay on the floor of the vault, exhausted but too anxious to even try sleeping. The stone walls loomed over him, simultaneously too high and too narrow, bearing down with suffocating pressure. He had come close to tears several times already, after trying everything he could think of to open the door, to no avail. Every time he grew too frustrated he would lie down and try to calm himself, his nose and his eyes burning as he held back the urge to sob. It wouldn't help anything.

An hour passed, and the hope that Nalrod would come down here and find him dwindled. The goblin would probably get in a huge amount of trouble if anybody found out he'd let Harry take his place, or that he'd left Gringotts illegally, so he was probably waiting for Harry to appear.

As more time passed, Harry began to wonder if Nalrod hadn't just lied outright to manipulate him into trading faces. There wasn't anything Harry could do to change himself back. What if Nalrod had taken the opportunity to be a human forever, leaving Harry to rot?

He had to convince himself that that was unlikely. It had been a complete spur-of-the-moment idea and decision. There was no way Nalrod had managed to plan it.

But even it hadn't been planned, that didn't mean the goblin couldn't have thought of it after the fact. Even Harry was thinking about it, and it would make sense, from Nalrod's point of view. What was the goblin supposed to think when Harry didn't show up? Harry wasn't even sure if Nalrod could change himself back without Harry there.

Harry tried to think of anybody else whom he could call for help. If only he had Petri's emergency quill! He cursed himself for thoughtlessly leaving it with his robes when he had changed. He'd forgotten all about it in the thick of things.

The ironic thing was that he did still have his wand, and he could theoretically call the aurors. That was a last resort, though. Harry was sure that what was doing was highly illegal, and even if he kept mum about the details, well, he was inside a Gringotts vault that didn't belong to him. There just wasn't a good explanation for that. He could say that he'd been tricked, which was true in a way and believable since he was a child, but he still wasn't sure that Nalrod hadn't earnestly been trying to visit his friend on Christmas. He knew for a fact that what Nalrod was doing actually was illegal, and Nalrod was an adult, and a goblin, and Harry didn't want something terrible to happen to him if hadn't meant to steal Harry's face.

An eternity of waiting later, Harry's stomach had twisted itself into an agonising knot, and he decided that aurors were probably preferable to starving to death. He raised his wand up above his head and cried, " _lux aurora_!" A shower of red sparks shot out of the tip of his wand, indicating that the spell had worked. Now he just had to wait. He felt suddenly much calmer, like a weight had lifted from his shoulders.

The spell was supposed to provide his location to the Auror Office, and let them apparate to the spot, but Harry figured it was impossible to apparate into Gringotts, since that would be highly insecure. Still, they would know that something was wrong.

Or would they? Had the magic managed to leave Gringotts? Harry grew more and more doubtful as time passed and there was still no sign that anyone was coming. He held on to hope, but it dwindled rapidly as the response time verged on unacceptable. Hours passed.

Harry lay on his back again, silent tears leaking out of the corners of his eyes. He'd never felt this helpless in his life, or been so far at the end of his wits. He'd got out of every scrape and problem before, even hard ones. He'd survived the Dursleys, the first bewildering weeks with Petri, and the debacle of Lucius Malfoy's interest. Maybe some of it had been luck, but there had always been things he could do to move forward.

Now he was stuck. He literally could not think of what to do next.

After some time in a stupor of hopelessness, he managed to calm himself, at least temporarily, and stood up to make more attempts at the door. He was a wizard, and had magic. That had to count for something. Petri seemed to believe that it would save him when his life was in danger. Well, it was in danger now.

None of the spells he knew seemed like they would help. Besides the fire-making charm, whose resultant fire was not nearly hot enough to melt metal, the severing charm was the only destructive spell he knew, and it wasn't as if he could use it to cut through the door either. He had tried, just in case, but it hadn't even made a scratch. The vault door was supposed to be secure, so it would probably stand up to even an adult wizard's magical knowledge.

That was just the door, though. Harry, or rather Nalrod, was supposed to have been responsible for the rest of the security measures, whatever those were. The vault was rock where it was not metal, however, and Harry had just as much luck trying to cut that as he did with the door. Frustrated and tired, he lowered his wand and slumped back to the ground, closing his eyes.

He must have fallen asleep, because the next thing he knew, he was being woken by voices.

Voices?

"Nalrod!" someone yelled. Harry sat up, his heart swelling with gratitude at the sight of Gornuk Turnlink's incensed goblin face. "You—what—how—I'm terribly sorry sir, rest assured this sort of thing isn't the norm."

Harry blinked and then felt his stomach drop as he briefly met the eyes of the old man whom Gornuk was addressing. Gornuk turned to glare daggers at Harry, reminding him to get to his feet. Harry had no idea how much time he'd spent asleep, but if Nalrod hadn't returned and Gornuk still thought he was the other goblin, that meant it looked like Nalrod was sleeping on the job.

That was embarrassing, but preferable to the truth.

"Sorry," Harry muttered as he exited the vault, head down, figuring that it would be best not to make a scene. He couldn't help breaking out into a smile, however, as he made it past the door; it was such a relief.

"Wait," said the wizard. Harry stopped and turned nervously, his heart leaping into his throat. Reflexively, he tried to move his hands out of sight, but the wizard's hand darted out lightning-quick and grabbed his arm to stop him.

"Sir—" Gornuk protested as the wizard drew his wand and pointed it at Harry.

"That's no goblin," he said. Harry felt his blood freeze. The old wizard stared intently into his eyes, and Harry was too scared to even look away.

A cry of "Thief!" and Harry's head whipped around to look at Gornuk, who had his eyes fixed on Harry's very human hands, an ugly grimace of realisation on his face. "What have you done with Nalrod?" He advanced with every word, until the practically spitting goblin was right in Harry's face.

"Nothing!" Harry shouted. He couldn't hear himself speak; his ears were ringing. "Nalrod did this to me!"

"Liar! Wizard _khora zgvlast!_ " Gornuk spat. Then he froze, seemed to notice the old wizard who still had Harry firmly in his grasp, and backed away slightly. He coughed as if to clear his throat. "Apologies. I got carried away. Gringotts regrets this oversight. Rest assured we will increase your vault security, free of charge, of course. And you may leave the thief to goblin justice."

Gornuk bared his teeth threateningly.

"That won't be necessary," said the wizard, and despite himself Harry slumped a little in relief. He didn't know what Gornuk meant by "goblin justice," but he thought he would rather take his chances with aurors. "I should like to deal with the matter myself."

Gornuk looked hesitant, but then the man added, "Quietly," and the goblin relaxed.

"Of course, sir," he said.

Quietly? What did that mean? Harry finally recovered his wits enough to begin looking for an escape route. He still had his wand on him, though it was in his back pocket and not easily accessible. He had an old wizard and a goblin against him, however, and a sadly limited spell repertoire.

Harry felt his body suddenly stiffen like a board as his legs locked together. Out of nowhere, thick ropes sprang into existence and wrapped themselves around his body, and he was kept upright only by the wizard's grip. Well, that complicated things.

He shuddered as a wet sensation crawled down his neck, like someone had cracked a raw egg over his head. He tried to move to shake off the unsettling feeling, but only his eyes obeyed his mind, and he blinked rapidly as he failed to see any part of his body below him.

Then he was floating along, like a puppet.

"If you could take us back to the surface," said the old wizard. And Gornuk practically fell over himself to get to the cart. Harry got the impression that the goblin wanted the both of them out of Gringotts post haste.

The ride up to the bank was significantly more nauseating and painful for Harry without the ability to move and brace himself for sharp turns. On the way out, the door smacked into the back of his head and his vision swam.

The moment the wizard's foot left the last step outside of Gringotts he grabbed onto Harry's invisible arm, which rippled slightly, and disapparated.

As it turned out, the sensation of being squeezed through a too-narrow tube was a thousand times worse when it was impossible to move, and he was tied up with ropes.

Harry could barely move his face enough to suck in great lungfuls of air as they emerged on the other side. Even a minute later he still felt terribly short of breath, and his head ached.

The old wizard flicked his wand, and with that single casual motion Harry was bent and seated on a chair and suddenly visible again. The stiffness was also gone, though, still being tied up, he remained mostly unable to move.

Harry's eyes darted back and forth. They had appeared in a brightly lit room. The floor was made of pale stone tile, and out of the corner of Harry's eye he saw part of what appeared to be a large counter. It appeared to be somebody's kitchen. Was this the old man's home?

"Who are you?" the old wizard asked him.

"Harry," said Harry.

"Harry..." the man repeated.

Harry frowned, debating giving his false name, but then that might implicate Petri somehow. The man's steely grey eyes flashed and darkened at his hesitation.

"Harry Potter," he finally said. The old wizard's brow crinkled in confusion.

"Curious," he said. "So you cannot tell me."

Harry was sure that he had just said his name, but this reaction was presumably a result of the _fidelius_ charm, so he only nodded.

"What were you doing in my vault?" asked the man. "Sleeping in my vault."

Despite himself, Harry flushed.

"I was trying to set it up," he said. "But I didn't know how. I got stuck inside." It felt strangely right to tell the truth. And why wouldn't it? He didn't have anything to hide, did he?

"Set it up?" the man repeated.

"The security," said Harry.

"I see. Why were you posing as a goblin?"

Harry felt a surge of injustice at this, and frowned. "A goblin is posing as me," he bit out. "We traded faces, and he said he'd be back in an hour, but he isn't back yet, obviously." He closed his mouth, wondering what had prompted him to say so much. The truth was good, but he didn't have to show all his cards. Wasn't it better to lay out the whole story, though?

"Do you have any idea where he might be?" the man asked sharply, the undertone of urgency suddenly shining through. "Any idea at all?"

"Knockturn Alley, maybe," said Harry. "He said he wanted to visit a friend there."

"How old are you?" was the next question, and Harry was rather bemused.

"Ten," he answered anyway, almost automatically.

The old man looked staggered at that. "Ten," he repeated. "Where are your parents?"

"Dead," said Harry vaguely, but he couldn't focus. There was a sudden, very strong ringing in his ears, and his vision tunneled. He thought he heard an exclamation, but the sound was distant and fading. He felt like he was falling, even though he could simultaneously still feel his body sitting there, unmoved.

It was like being in two places at once, and then Harry was rushing through the darkness, a blur of orange at the corner of his eye and wind in his face. He tried to blink but his vision didn't change, and then it did and he was glancing up at the tall white monolith that was Gringotts. He turned quickly to focus on walking instead, however, intent on his destination.

The snow hampered his movement at first, but then somehow it started to flow around his feet, as if anticipating his steps. At the corner he turned onto Knockturn Alley.

It was busier than Diagon Alley. There were hags about marketing their esoteric, disgusting wares, and other hags apparently interested in buying them. A shabby wizard was sitting on the steps of a shop, playing a tune on a flute, apparently charming a snake to dance. As Harry passed by, the door of the shop burst open and what was presumably the shopkeeper brandished his wand at the snake charmer to run him off.

Soon enough, the shops were behind him, and he was entering the residential area. It was the wrong side of the road to go to the cemetery.

The houses looked wavy, and Harry tried to blink again but it didn't work. The white of the ground slurred all around him until everything was white for a moment, and then he noticed 66 Knockturn, the cemetery, and its gate was open. A tall man in a cloak stepped out.

It was Silviu!

"Harry," Silviu called, but Harry kept on walking without even looking back, even though he wanted to respond. He was surprised the vampire had recognised him so easily after so long out of contact. Why was he out and about during the day? It was heavily overcast, but even so, the snow made everything bright.

"Harry," said Silviu, practically next to his ear, but he didn't look back—instead, he broke out into a run, clutching something to his chest. Harry was astonished to find an envelope in his hands. Had that been there?

A clawed hand grasped his shoulder, halting his progress. Harry reached up with his own hand but it felt wrong, too large for him.

The next moment the world turned on its axis, a blur of grey and white, and his back slammed against a brick wall. He might have cried out, but he heard nothing; it was like his breath had been robbed from him. Silviu's face was right up against his, and his normally dull eyes were blazing, like someone had replaced them with glowing coals. The eyes bored into him, swallowing the world.

It was a long moment before he realised that they weren't even _there_ anymore. Fiery afterimages danced across his vision and his thoughts were hopelessly scrambled, his attention strewn every which way.

A sharp pain in his neck finally drew his scattered wits together. He tried to struggle but he was held fast, and his body felt weak, as if suddenly made of jelly.

Oddly enough, he wasn't panicked or scared at all. There was just an overwhelming sense of betrayal—strange, because there had not been anything to betray—and strong puzzlement, because he could not for the life of him figure out how it had come to this point. He felt light.

Vaguely he registered that he couldn't see. But that was normal, wasn't it?

After all, he was asleep.

Harry's eyes snapped open and he sucked in a desperate breath. His heart was pounding in his ears, even though his mind was calm, and his body felt slick with sweat. His slapped his hand to the side of neck and rubbed it frantically, checking for wounds, just in case. Nothing, of course, but it had felt so real. He tried to calm his breathing.

He glanced down, disoriented, and confirmed that his arms were free, and he was in a bed, but not his own bed. Someone had changed out his Gringotts uniform for an unfamiliar nightgown. He reached up to wipe the sweat from his brow and felt smooth skin.

Startled, he patted his face with both hands, feeling the contours with some excitement. He couldn't be sure, but it seemed like Nalrod's spell had worn off, and he was back to himself. He prodded at his nose a few times to convince himself that it was no longer large and pointed.

"Ah, you're awake. Are you all right?"

Harry sat up quickly, nearly tangling himself in the sheets as he did so. The old wizard whose vault he had been trapped in was standing in the door. It occurred to him that now the man had seen his real face, and it would be even harder to get away, but he put that worry to the side.

"Er, yeah," said Harry, because aside from the disturbingly realistic dream he'd just experienced, he really was fine. He flushed when he realised that he must have passed out earlier. Perhaps the ropes had been too tight. Given that he wasn't tied up now, however, maybe things had worked out for the best.

He glanced around. He wasn't in the same room as before, but he was sure it was the same house. The wainscoting was the same colour and pattern. In this room, there were various paintings on the walls, though for some reason, all the frames showed background images, and seemed to be missing some vital component.

"Did you see what happened to your goblin… friend?" the man asked.

"Huh?" Harry said as he got to his feet, unable to make sense of the question. Suddenly feeling vulnerable with nothing at his back, he shuffled over to the wall and leaned against it.

"Your sympathetic vision," said the man unhelpfully. When Harry continued to stare at him in bewilderment, he tried, "Your dream."

Suddenly, Harry felt like ice had formed in the pit of his stomach. The journey into Knockturn Alley, the envelope, the too-long fingers, running from Silviu—now he understood. That had been Nalrod, not him. Harry hadn't walked down Knockturn Alley for months, but his dream, his vision, had captured every notable detail. And he'd never put much stock in Petri's paranoia about Silviu, so why would he dream that Silviu attacked him?

But if that vision was real, that meant that Silviu _had_ attacked him, or at least, someone who appeared to be him. Had Petri been right all along? Harry couldn't reconcile it with his impression of Silviu. The vampire he remembered was so composed. By the gate, he had called Harry's name. If he'd meant to attack, why would he give warning? It didn't add up.

It still did not change the facts. "He was attacked by a vampire," Harry said.

The old man grimaced.

"How did you know about my dream?" Harry asked. "That I would have one?"

"The goblin used sympathetic transformation to trade appearances with you. That kind of magic tends to result in a mental connection," the wizard explained.

Harry frowned. "But I didn't see anything he did before, or get any impressions from him. I even slept a bit, well, like you saw, and didn't have any dreams. Why now?" he asked a little hesitantly. His mind was already working to piece together an answer to his own question, but it prompted a queasy feeling in his stomach. The outcome of Silviu's attack—he hadn't seen that. Had Nalrod lost consciousness, or worse?

The grim look on the elderly wizard's face did not bode well. "The connection broke early on. It was only when your magic returned to you to reverse the transformation that you received your vision."

In some ways, this man reminded Harry of Petri. He made explanations in a practised way; perhaps he too, was a teacher. Petri, however, had never exhibited the strange hesitation that Harry sensed here, as if the man were trying to skirt around some detail.

"Because he died, didn't he?" Harry asked, simultaneously filled with certainty and with hope that he was wrong. The words burned his throat and threatened to choke him as he spoke, but he had to say them.

The look in the man's eyes was enough, but he went on to say, "Yes, most likely."

Harry shut his eyes and his hands clenched into fists. He should never have agreed to Nalrod's ridiculous request. Everything had gone wrong because he'd agreed despite himself, despite common sense. Nalrod had died, actually died, and Harry had nearly been trapped in a vault—it was sheer luck its owner had visited the very next day, and not a week later, when Harry would have been done for. It was an unmitigated disaster.

"What's—what's going to happen now?" he asked. The old wizard had untied him and put him in this bed, but that didn't mean anything. Surely the goblins would go into an uproar to find out what had happened? Realising how ambiguous the question was, he amended, "Are they, Gringotts, are they going to find Nalrod's body? We have to tell them."

Paradoxically, he felt calmer talking about the body. Corpses he was familiar with. It felt like forever ago that Petri had laughed at him for being disgusted by them, and anyway, he lived in a cemetery.

"It would be best to say nothing," said the old man.

"What? Why?" Harry asked, biting his lip. There he went again, asking without thinking about it first. With Petri he could remember to wait, to avoid any possible stinging hexes, but it seemed he was destined to forget with anyone else, on the occasions he even got to speak to other people.

The man did not seem to be annoyed, however, and answered him patiently: "Goblins take trespass very seriously, and they do not see things as wizards do. Age doesn't matter to them. Doubtless Turnlink only let you go because he thought I would be very angry with you, angry enough..."

"Are you angry?" Harry blurted. Gornuk must have thought the wizard would be angry enough to kill, he guessed uneasily. The goblin had been positively seething.

"Not in the slightest," said the man. "As I see it, it was entirely an accident, coincidence, that you found yourself in my vault. I can hardly fault you for helping someone see his friend on Christmas day. It was very noble of you."

"But he died," Harry said, his voice cracking a little. "It's my fault, if I hadn't let him—I mean, it was obviously illegal too..."

"My boy, you couldn't have known," said the old wizard, and Harry shook his head, even though he knew the man was right, at least about Nalrod's death. "Sometimes, good deeds have terrible consequences. That doesn't mean we should stop trying to do good deeds, stop doing what we think is right. You can't know what will happen."

Harry nodded, even though he didn't believe what the man was saying. It didn't matter if he had thought it was the right thing at the time, if the consequences could be so awful. He ought to have thought it through better. Knockturn Alley was dangerous for children to traverse alone. Harry had known that, but he hadn't taken the warning seriously, and someone else had paid for it.

"Now, you must be eager to be getting home. Do you have a guardian I can contact?" the man asked.

"Er, Jochen Peters," said Harry, hoping the false name would work. "We live in Knockturn." The old man seemed concerned by that, so Harry added quickly, "I don't go out by myself. I mean I was only alone for a little, in Diagon Alley."

"I checked with the auror office to see if anyone reported a missing child recently, but there was nothing. Do you know why your guardian wouldn't have reported it?" the wizard asked. He didn't sound suspicious, but it was obvious that he was.

"Er, he's half vampire," Harry said, the remainder of a plausible story thankfully coming to him easily. "He doesn't like dealing with the Ministry, so maybe he was waiting, to see if he could find me or if I'd come back."

The man nodded, though he looked pensive.

"I will take you to your home, then," he finally said. "My house is not connected to the floo network, so we must apparate."

With a casual swish of his wand, the nightgown Harry wore was transfigured into black robes. Instinctively, he reached down to pat his pocket, and found that his wand was already there.

"Thanks," he said, relieved and a little amazed that he was simply to be returned home like this, no further questions asked. The man nodded and held out his arm.

There must have been a designated apparition spot in Diagon Alley, or perhaps it was just convenient, but they appeared exactly where Petri and Harry had the previous morning, although unlike on Christmas Day the Alley was bustling with activity and the archway that led to the Leaky Cauldron was open to admit a steady stream of witches and wizards.

"Lead the way," said the man, when they reached the entrance to Knockturn. Despite himself, Harry felt a little wary walking down the street and retracing Nalrod's steps, but they made it without incident.

The man seemed a bit surprised when they stopped in front of the cemetery.

"I live here. I mean, past the graveyard there's some places," Harry said, not entirely willing to admit outright that he lived in a coffin.

"It's not too far, then?" the man asked.

"No," said Harry. "I can go on my own," he added, as the man seemed simultaneously to want and not want to leave him, by the conflicted expression on his face.

"Best of luck, then, my boy," said the man. "Do be careful."

"Thanks," said Harry. "Wait, what's your name?"

The man hesitated, and then said, "Nic. It was good meeting you, Harry."

"Good meeting you too, Nic," said Harry, though he felt a little sceptical still about the wizard's attitude. The whole situation of their meeting was probably the opposite of good.

Still, Harry was home. He said the password ("Honoria Nutcombe") and the chains slithered over each other until they no longer crossed, allowing him to push open the cemetery gate.

Instead of taking the main path, he cut through the yew grove, ducking under the twisted, low-hanging branches and weaving through a haphazard row of tombstones.

"Harry!" a familiar voice called, and he glanced up, his heart skipping a beat as he locked eyes with Silviu.

"Er, Silviu," he managed to say, and though he had the sudden impulse to run, he repressed it, too cognisant of how Nalrod had tried running already, and how that had failed miserably.

"Are you all right?" Silviu asked, stepping off the path and coming towards him. Harry stood his ground, stopping his unruly foot from taking a step back against his will.

"I'm fine," Harry said, almost mumbling.

"I found a goblin impersonating you yesterday," Silviu said.

A spark of rage ignited inside Harry, and he clenched his fists. Had Silviu simply made a mistake, assumed the worst? But that was even worse than if he had just attacked out of malice, or lost control, or something of that sort. Harry's thoughts raced so quickly that they became a jumbled mess, and he felt lightheaded.

"That was my friend," he said, or thought he said. He blinked, his vision greying alarmingly for a moment, and Silviu had somehow got right next to him, and was kneeling down and looking at him worriedly.

"Are you all right?" Silviu asked, and hadn't he just asked the same thing a moment ago?

"I'm fine," said Harry again, shaking his head to try to clear it, but that only served to make him dizzy.

"Should I walk you to your home?" asked Silviu.

"No, I'm fine," Harry repeated, pushing the vampire away rather harshly. Silviu fell back gracefully and let him go as he stumbled his way towards the field of coffin houses. When he had progressed far enough for it not to be embarrassing Harry stopped for a moment to steady himself on a nearby gravestone, flummoxed at his sudden exhaustion.

Maybe it was hunger, or thirst, that was getting to him. He hadn't eaten anything since yesterday noon, before he and Petri had gone to Diagon Alley, so it had been nearly a full day. There was a stale, rusty taste in his mouth.

At the casket door, Harry reached into his pocket and realised very quickly that he didn't have his key. It was lost down in Gringotts, along with his original robes and the other things in his pocket that weren't his wand. At least he had had the thought to take his wand.

Would the goblins find his discarded robes? Would they be able to use them to find out who he was? It was a scary prospect, but there wasn't anything Harry could do about it even if they could. He grit his teeth and resolved not to think about it.

He rapped on the coffin door, but there was no response. Maybe Petri was in the trunk and couldn't hear him, or else he was out.

"Rosenkol," Harry tried calling, but no elf appeared. He frowned and sat down on the lid to wait, wondering a little uneasily what he was supposed to do if Petri didn't come.

He didn't have to worry, however, because Petri showed up before long. At the sight of Harry sitting on the door to their home, he stared for a long moment. Then his face twisted in fury, and Harry felt like his heart had dropped down into his stomach.

"So, you're alive," said Petri. "Get up."

Harry scrambled to his feet, a little confused, but then remembered that he had been blocking the door. Petri tapped it with his wand in lieu of using the key and the casket lid sprang open. Wordlessly, he beckoned for Harry to precede him down the steps.

It was dark inside, but with a negligent gesture from Petri bluebell flames sprung to life in a multitude of glass bowls scattered around the room. He turned away briefly to shut the door, and then rounded on Harry.

"I knew it was foolish to leave you by yourself," he said, his German slow and deliberate, almost hissed. "I almost expected that you wouldn't be there. I waited, of course. Perhaps you had lost track of time. After a certain point, I had to resign myself to reality. I went to Knockturn Alley, and can you imagine what far-fetched story our landlord, that vampire, told me?"

He was almost spitting, and Harry tried to back up, only to find that he was already standing against the wall. He shook his head, even though he had a very good idea.

"He'd found a goblin, _a goblin,_ wearing your face, walking up the Alley in broad daylight. And naturally, being the law-abiding citizen he is, the vampire saw an opportunity and ate the creature!" Petri cried.

Harry flinched at the confirmation of Nalrod's fate.

"Naturally, I wouldn't believe him without evidence, that is, believe that he hadn't killed you outright and invented a ridiculous story to excuse himself, so he kindly," Petri said this very sarcastically, "gave me the body. I thought it was a joke. It looked just like you."

Petri took a deep breath, and Harry thought he almost sounded distressed, but that couldn't be right. Why would he care if Harry died? He'd had other apprentices, other very dead apprentices, so it wouldn't have been something new.

"But he was right, it was a goblin. I'm sure you know who it was. We had a very nice conversation about you," said Petri.

"You've talked?" Harry asked, bewildered.

"Idiot boy!" Petri spat, "Necromancy."

"Oh," said Harry very faintly, feeling a little ill. "Can—can I talk to him?"

"No," Petri said with distinct finality, and Harry didn't dare protest. "What are you good for but trouble?" Petri asked. Harry continued to keep his mouth shut.

Petri sighed deeply before inhaling in a measured way, as if to calm himself. "Nalrod Snipseed," he said, confirming that he had talked to precisely the right dead goblin, "seemed to be convinced that you would be as dead as he was when the goblins found out about you. The thing was distraught, as if it had a right to be. I didn't dare scry for you," Petri said, fists clenching. "I can't afford to lose another apprentice."

Of course _that_ would be his reason for concern. Harry felt anger flare up, despite himself.

"Why not?" he asked.

It was lightning-quick. Petri's wand practically appeared in his empty hand and Harry saw the flash of light before he heard the word, " _Crucio!_ " and then he heard himself screaming.

He was on the ground and his knee was throbbing where it had struck the floorboards, and the curse couldn't have been on him for more than a second, but Harry was shaking. He glanced up and saw that Petri had pocketed his wand again and was not looking at him.

"You must be hungry," Petri said at length, finally turning around once Harry had managed to pull himself back to his feet. Harry blinked incredulously at this comment. Was Petri simply going to now pretend that nothing had ever happened? It seemed to be a special talent of his.

"I'm starving, and dying of thirst," Harry said carefully, supposing that this was their truce. Petri conjured a little glass bowl, and then conjured water to fill it with. Harry took it and sipped at it, relishing the coolness against his parched throat. He couldn't resist gulping the rest down, though he immediately felt a little queasy afterwards.

Then Petri handed him a familiar nutritive potion, because of course there was no real food in the house. Harry tipped it into his mouth anyway. It wasn't the time to complain. With a last glance at Petri, who was watching him with an unreadable expression, Harry turned to his bed and stumbled over into its inviting warmth.

He dreamt of Silviu and fire and pain, and woke up shuddering, the echo of the cruciatus curse dancing across his skin. His neck hurt. He rubbed at it, which made it worse, and froze as his fingers came away wet. He brought them close to his face and saw something dark and glistening.

Harry sprang out of bed and ran to the toilet. It was dark, so he fumbled for his wand, but was surprised for a moment to find that his clothes had changed back to the Gringotts uniform at some point, any transfiguration having worn off. He found his wand in the back pocket, and stuck the tip in the jar by the door.

" _Incendio,_ " he said, and his wand spat out an orange spark. Gritting his teeth, he tried the spell again, this time wiggling his wand in a slightly rounder way, and a small blue tongue of flame shot out and curled up in the jar. Close enough.

He turned to the mirror that had been hung up above the washbasin and nearly flinched at his own appearance, dishevelled and lit up by eerie blue flame.

"You look positively dreadful," the mirror commented, and Harry scowled. His scowl was replaced by a grimace as he confirmed that his hand, was, in fact, bloodstained, and that the blood had come from his neck, just under the high collar of his shirt. He unbuttoned the uniform slightly and tilted back his head, but it was difficult to find an angle where he could see the wound properly.

"Aren't you a little young for a love bite?" asked the mirror.

"Shut up," Harry said rather forcefully, and with a tinge of fear. It sounded almost like something Silviu might say. He still couldn't see properly, but he was almost sure that there were twin puncture marks in his throat. He washed his hand in the basin and watched a little numbly as the little red cloud in the water disappeared under the purity enchantment. He scooped up some water to wash the blood from his neck.

He winced as his fingers snagged on a half-peeled scab. How had he received this bite? Wouldn't he remember something like this? He tried in vain to pull up some recollection, but his mind kept jumping back to the image of Silviu's fiery eyes, of Nalrod's last moments. That wasn't _his_ memory. There was no way the magic could have given him Nalrod's wound, was there?

Harry stepped out of the toilet and was surprised to see the room fully lit by bluebell flames and Petri approaching him in his nightgown.

"Why are you up? Go back to sleep," Petri said. "It's still the middle of the—what's that?" His eyes zeroed in on Harry's wound.

"I don't know," Harry said, more calmly than he felt, "but it looks like a vampire bite."

Before he could voice any theory, Petri had closed the distance in two strides and was shining a bright beam of light at him from his wand. Harry winced and shut his eyes against the glare.

"That animal," Petri snarled. "How did you get back from Gringotts yesterday? Did you walk through Knockturn? You had to, you didn't have money to floo."

Harry realised that he had never got the opportunity to explain his side of the story, nor why he had been detained at Gringotts for so long. Petri must have assumed that the goblins had found him out, which was true, in a way. Harry decided he would rather keep the details blurry.

"There was someone with me," Harry said, "a wizard. He helped me, er, escape the bank."

"Who?" Petri asked.

"Er, he said his name was Nic. He's really old." Harry flushed at the rather lackluster description.

"He walked you all the way here?" Petri asked.

"Well, not quite, just up to the gate," Harry said, a sinking feeling in his chest. "I saw Silviu in the cemetery, after. But he didn't do anything."

"You don't remember him doing anything," Petri corrected, frowning deeply.

"You mean he memory charmed me?" Harry asked, feeling a little sick. Silviu could have done literally anything to him! Well, probably he had just bitten Harry and taken some blood, but still. It was deeply violating to find out about it second hand.

"Something like that, most likely," said Petri. "Mind magic is a special talent of vampires."

"But it was during the day," Harry protested. "I thought vampires can't use their magic during the day?"

"Then perhaps it was a regular memory charm," said Petri, "Recall that our friend here has a wand and knows how to use it."

Of course half vampires could do magic whenever, as Harry had researched, but he hadn't realised that it was on account of having a wand. He felt increasingly ill, if that was even possible, and had to swallow thickly. That only provoked a twinge in his neck. He grit his teeth.

"Yes, that would explain why you even remember his presence at all," Petri said. "Memory charms are not overly precise."

"What do I do?" Harry asked a little despairingly.

"Do?" Petri repeated. "You'll learn every possible way of repelling a vampire. I should have taught you before, but I thought it would be too difficult."

Harry frowned. There were a lot of things he would have liked to have known before, like a spell to blow up a warded iron door, but he suspected that Petri would have thought it too difficult as well, and would probably have been right.

"What about this?" Harry asked, gesturing to his wound, which seemed to have clotted again.

"It will be a minor curse scar," said Petri. "It's nothing compared to that one on your forehead."

"A curse?" Harry repeated, alarmed. "I won't become a vampire, will I?"

"No," said Petri immediately, and Harry was relieved. "As long as you do not die within the next few years."

Harry was less relieved.


	19. Investigator

Ashes were not supposed to burn, but Nalrod's ashes burned a violent red, casting the pensieve engravings in a hellish glow.

This piece of necromancy was surprisingly easy, Harry thought. All he had had to do was cast a fire-making charm with the wish to see what had happened to Nalrod, to understand.

He needed desperately to understand.

Why had Silviu intended to attack him? Because there was no doubt of it in Harry's mind now. Silviu had probably not meant to kill Harry, since he had his attack opportunity the next day and left him alive, but he had targeted him. On the other hand, he had murdered Nalrod outright.

Petri had tried to explain to Harry why the vampire had gone for the kill upon realising that "Harry" was actually Nalrod. Normally, a vampire would go after the same wizard or witch victim several times before finally killing them, if they could, because there was more magic in the blood than could be consumed at once, and vampires drank blood to collect the magic that their own closed-loop flows could not extract from the environment. Goblins, however, not only carried less magic than wizards, their magic was also more similar to vampire magic and therefore more easily assimilated.

Harry didn't think that Petri's explanation really got to the root of the matter, however. Silviu hadn't _needed_ to kill Nalrod at all. He hadn't been starving to death. He didn't just drink blood to survive. It was obvious in the way he flaunted his illegal wand whenever he could get away with it, the way he had enough extra magic to do power-intensive spells like conjurations, that he had had a surplus of victims.

The only explanation was that he just did not care. Still, it didn't sit well with Harry that Silviu could act so normally with people all while considering them as nothing more than food. How could anybody be so evil without giving off any sign of it until it was too late? Harry instinctively wanted to give the vampire the benefit of the doubt, even though it was beyond obvious that he didn't deserve it.

Looking into the crimson fire hurt Harry's eyes, but in a good way. The colour reminded him of Silviu's eyes when he revealed his true, monstrous self. He could see it too, more vividly than ever—Nalrod's final memory. The fire sharpened the vision to precision clarity.

Silviu had called Harry's name, and Nalrod, not wishing to interact with someone acquainted with Harry, simply pretended he hadn't heard. Then Silviu had closed the distance instantly, somehow, like apparition but smooth and insidious. Nalrod could sense how he had disappeared and reappeared seamlessly in the most alarming manner. The goblin had tried to run. Not deterred, Silviu sped up and grasped him by the shoulder. The mistake was in trying to push him away—Nalrod revealed his goblin hands and Silviu remarked them immediately.

Silviu threw him against the wall with such force that bones cracked. He obviously had intended to commit murder at the outset. Then the world was swallowed up by Silviu's eyes; it must have been some kind of vampire mind trick.

Harry tore his gaze from the rapidly dying flames. It went dark, and when Harry cast _lumos_ to inspect the pensieve, he saw only a murky, red sludge that reminded him of dried blood. Shuddering, he put his wand to his temple and focused on his vision, pulling away a strand of silver, which splashed into the bowl. He stirred it with his wand and gradually it mixed with what remained of Nalrod to form a dark grey soup.

According to Petri's outline of the process, there would be other memories in there, lines of fate that led up to Nalrod's death. Any experiences with or knowledge about vampires, perhaps. Details about whom he had been visiting, almost certainly. Harry didn't really want to see any of them, because it was private and felt like stealing, but at the same time he had finished the final desecration of Nalrod's remains, and it would be a waste not to put it to use.

Feeling miserable, Harry shoved his face in the bowl with perhaps more force than necessary. It didn't matter, because as soon as the tip of his nose met the memories his world went dark and he was tumbling through a sea of fog.

He landed in the depths of Gringotts, inside a vault, and was unable to repress a shudder at the reminder of being trapped with no hope of escape. The door to this vault was open, however, and Nalrod was standing just outside it in his scarlet uniform.

The inside of the vault was rather pitiful. There was a small pile of knuts and only five sickles. The paltry sum looked comical in the centre of such a large space.

A woman wearing threadbare, faded brown robes stood at the threshold. Long clumps of stringy blond hair hanging from her bowed head obscured her face as she bent down with obvious difficulty and scooped up a fistful of knuts. Her hand shook as it reached up to slide the money into her pocket.

She shuffled out of the vault, and as she passed Harry glimpsed her face. He felt a strong impression of wonder, and the memory grew sharper.

The woman's skin was dark and cracked from the sun, especially her face. The bags under her eyes were almost as bad as Silviu's during the day, and there was a long, raised scar across the bridge of her nose. Harry was somewhat repulsed by her appearance but it was obvious that Nalrod was enamoured.

Fog cascaded onto the scene, obscuring everything and then clearing to show Nalrod at the post office.

"What do you mean, the letter couldn't be delivered?" the goblin demanded. The witch at the counter scowled.

"Are you simple? The owl came back. The address doesn't exist," she said. Harry was taken aback by her rudeness.

Nalrod seemed unfazed. "There's a name. You must have pretty low quality owls here."

"It's a fake name. There's no such person as Annette Yaxley. Everybody knows how Corban Yaxley's the last of his line," said the clerk.

"Are you suggesting Gringotts let a non-existent person open an account?" said Nalrod. "It's impossible."

"I'm saying we can't deliver this letter," the witch said, sighing loudly. "Go deliver it yourself, if you're so sure it's a real person, or go back to Gringotts. Either way, you don't have any business here."

"Fine," said Nalrod, and he turned dramatically on his heel and left the building.

Fog rolled. When it cleared the scene was eerily parallel to that of Nalrod's death. The goblin hurried down Knockturn Alley, drawing his cloak tightly about him. Even in the middle of the day the narrow alley was gloomy, the tall buildings on either side casting deep shadows.

Nalrod had a letter clutched in his hand again, but this one was obviously stamped with the red Gringotts seal, and was official.

Someone apparated directly in front of of Nalrod, and despite himself, Harry jumped. Nalrod, not so fortunate as to be intangible, shrieked and stumbled backwards, falling onto the dirty cobblestones.

Harry studied the new arrival. He looked very familiar. It took him a few moments to place it as Silviu, except the vampire looked positively ancient, with a wrinkled face and wispy white hair.

"You're not welcome here," said Silviu, his voice steady despite the appearance of frailty.

"I'm on Gringotts business," said Nalrod, picking himself up and holding up his letter, now a little smudged with dirt.

Silviu snatched the letter out of his grasp with lightning speed, eliciting an indignant, "Hey!"

Ignoring the goblin's protests, he turned the letter over, examined the address, and then pocketed it.

"I will ensure that this reaches the right hands. Now, get out of my alley, and do not return," he said.

"I demand you," Nalrod began, but what he demanded was not to be discovered because Silviu snatched him up by his lapels, choking off the rest of his words. He held the skinny goblin there for a long moment and watched him struggle, before dropping him unceremoniously onto the ground.

"Out," the vampire hissed, his eyes flashing.

Nalrod ran.

As he turned, Silviu grew blurry, but Harry could see that he took a step back into the shadows, even though he continued to watch the retreating goblin. Right. It was broad daylight. And then it was dark again as the memory ended.

Why didn't Silviu want Nalrod in the alley? And what did he mean _his_ alley?

The fog cleared and Harry saw that it was the woman at her vault again.

"Ma'am, did you get the notice of your rate change?"

"Rate change?" the woman asked at length, looking rather surprised at being addressed.

Nalrod grumbled something under his breath. "Gringotts sent you a letter," he said, more clearly.

"Oh," said the woman, her eyes brightening. "This letter. I received it." And, as she spoke, she pulled a rumpled letter out of the folds of her robes.

It was Nalrod's turn to look surprised. Harry saw why when he peered closer—the seal was unbroken.

"You didn't read it?" Nalrod demanded.

The woman glanced down, abashed. "I don't know how to read," she said. "But thank you for sending it, if it was important."

Nalrod stared at her in incomprehension. "It's just a notice that fees are increasing by half a percent starting next quar—I mean, two months from now."

"How much is that?" the woman asked, glancing worriedly at her tiny pile of money.

"A knut a year, for you," said Nalrod, his voice dropping to a mutter.

A knut was probably still a lot for someone who did not even have a galleon to her name. Harry compared it to Petri's thousands. If they could only give this woman a single one, she would be at least twice as rich.

It was just a memory, he reminded himself. But this woman was probably still out there somewhere.

"All right," said the woman in the memory, and she barely looked disappointed or worried. There was an air of quiet acquiescence about her, like she had got used to accepting everything in the same way because nothing she did ever mattered. Harry knew that feeling, knew it from watching Aunt Petunia favour Dudley over him whenever it was remotely possible, but he had never felt it about _everything_.

And this woman couldn't even read. Harry could scarcely imagine it. If he couldn't read, he would be dead. He would never have been able make it past the first few weeks of his apprenticeship, his at that time _theoretical_ apprenticeship, without books. How could he possibly have remembered everything Petri had said? Even a remembrall only helped so much, especially when the man could make offhand comments full of critical information at any time.

The woman had a posh accent, Harry noticed, which only confused him further. If someone had taught her to speak like that, why not teach her to read too?

When he looked up again, the woman had exited the vault, and was staring at something. Harry walked around her, still not entirely comfortable with walking through people, and saw that that something was Nalrod's hand, laden with sickles.

"Take this," said Nalrod, with no explanation at all.

"I'm sorry, I can't," said the woman, shaking her head. "I don't need—I don't want it."

Nalrod turned and tossed the coins into the vault, where they clattered to the ground.

"They're yours now," he said. "Even if you don't want them."

He turned away, and Harry got the sense that he was embarrassed.

"Thank you," said the woman a little stiffly. "Snipseed, right?"

"Yes, but call me Nalrod," said Nalrod.

"I'm Annette," said the woman. "Annette Vlaicu."

"Not Yaxley?" Nalrod asked.

"Not any longer," said Annette, looking away.

Then Harry found himself rudely spat back into reality, feeling like his head had been ejected from the pensieve by a spring. He stumbled back and landed painfully on his tail bone.

That was the end of it? Indignant, he picked himself up and prodded at the memories with his wand, but all he got was vapour in the form of Annette and Nalrod, talking to each other inaudibly. He sighed and turned away from the pensieve.

Harry considered the shelf of empty crystal phials, and picked the one on the end. He stuck his wand in the pensieve again and let the vapours play out their story and accrue on the tip, before he directed the silver strand into the phial. He just needed to keep the one. The rest could be allowed to evaporate.

He was so distracted as he left the trunk that he barely flinched at casting the severing charm at himself. After the incident with Ulrich's arm, Harry had been terrified that if he tried to cut himself he would accidentally chop his own arm off, even though he knew intellectually that it was completely impossible to do such a thing unless he genuinely _wanted_ that result. Indeed, the charm made a much shallower cut than he could manage with one of Petri's too-sharp knives, one which almost did not hurt.

 _Episkey_ was also an excellent charm that made Harry far less afraid of surface wounds. His cut healed without a trace.

When Harry surfaced, Petri was sitting at the table, reading the newspaper. "Did you see what you wanted?" he asked, without looking up.

Harry thought about how to answer that question, and finally decided to avoid it. "I saw some things," he said vaguely, pulling up a chair. "Do vampires hate goblins? In general?"

"If they do, I'm not aware of it," said Petri, peering at Harry over the edge of his newspaper.

"Nalrod tried to go into Knockturn once, and Silviu practically threw him out," Harry said.

"Vampires are very territorial," Petri acknowledged.

"What, and Silviu thinks the whole alley is his territory, or something?" Harry asked a little incredulously.

"Not unlikely," said Petri. "He's certainly powerful."

"But you said you could beat him," Harry said, "with dark magic."

"With necromancy," Petri said. "But it is a last resort."

"With necromancy, how?" Harry asked.

"Necromancy is almost always about finding the lines of fate," Petri said. "When you understand the lines of fate, then you can change them. A vampire acts on many lines of fate, so to defeat one, you must take control of those lines."

"I don't understand," said Harry. "If there's fate, does that mean the future is already set in stone?"

Petri shook his head. "Each thing is caused by another thing, yes?" he asked.

Harry nodded.

"Sometimes many things. A line of things that cause each other is a line of fate. They come together and break apart. But someone's last fate is death. Their lines end. From that point you can follow them and find where they came from, as you did with the pensieve."

"Okay, but what does that have to do with fighting vampires? Can you move all their fate lines together and kill them?" Harry asked.

Petri laughed, as if pleasantly surprised. "Perhaps you could travel back in time and change critical things, yes, but that is not what I meant."

"Time travel is possible?" Harry demanded.

"With a special device," said Petri. Harry was completely dumbfounded to hear this. There were time machines. This fact hardly seemed to faze Petri, and he continued: "But what I meant, is that when you understand the lines of fate, you understand everything which moves someone. If you know these motivations, you can control them. Unlike a human, a vampire has a time of death that you can use to follow the lines of fate without fail."

"Without fail" turned out to be a rather large stretch, as Harry found himself failing very much at this exercise even on dead spiders. It probably did not help that he found the whole thing a little circuitous—first he reanimated the dead spider and then tried to get control of it, control which he had purposefully given up in the reanimation process.

He did understand the point. The control of animation was direct control, and the spider could only act as a puppet, however he wanted it to. The control of necromancy was much more complex and delicate, and allowed him to give the spider larger, more autonomous tasks, in theory. In practice, Harry was not sure what kinds of tasks a spider would be able to do anyway.

"Is this really the only way to ward off vampires?" Harry asked after several hours worth of fruitless attempts, a little doubtful that the common wizard would have to know an illegal necromancy technique or be defenceless. If that were the case, he couldn't see why vampires hadn't gone and taken over the world.

"It is the least risky way," said Petri.

"But there are other ways?" Harry pressed. "It might be the least risky, but it's no good if I can't get it to work."

"You could duel," said Petri rather sardonically, and Harry scowled. "Other ways of fighting vampires are unlikely to work on our friend."

"Why? Because he has a wand?" Harry asked.

"Exactly because he has a wand, and knows how to use it. A vanishing charm easily cancels garlic. If you try an amulet or holy water, he will simply jinx you," said Petri.

"Holy water?" Harry asked, surprised that something like that would really work.

"It's a purification potion," said Petri. "It also suppresses sympathetic magic."

"What _is_ sympathetic magic?" Harry asked. "Nic said it's what Nalrod used to trade faces with me, but what is it?"

"As it is called, it is magic done with sympathy instead of willpower," said Petri. "Very difficult for wizards but natural for most other beings."

"Oh," said Harry, even though he did not understand entirely. He supposed that if it was easily understood, it wouldn't be something that was difficult for wizards. "So Silviu is even stronger than a normal wizard, because he also has this sympathetic magic?"

"His spellcasting is unlikely to match a wizard's, but he will have more than enough for you to worry about," said Petri.

Given that Harry knew all of two remotely offensive spells, he expected even a muggle would give him trouble in a fight. Silviu would probably not even need to resort to his wand. Harry recalled how the vampire had incapacitated Nalrod through sheer physical force, by slamming him into a wall.

He didn't like the thought, but it seemed more and more like the subtle necromancy approach might be his only hope.

"So what am I supposed to do?" Harry asked, hoping the answer was not, "practice."

"Perhaps you can learn to conjure large amounts of garlic," said Petri. He sounded serious, so Harry swallowed the urge to laugh abjectly, and only made a face. Petri stared at his wand in consideration for a minute or two, presumably trying to figure out how to manage such a conjuration, before he said, " _Orchideous,_ " and a bunch of tightly-packed purple flowers sprouted from his wand tip.

Harry sneezed violently, his eyes and nose immediately watering as if someone had chopped onions right in his face. Seeing this, Petri vanished his conjuration. Harry wheezed.

"It appears that you are now allergic to garlic," Petri said. "A side effect of the curse, most likely. Pity; it could have worked."

Harry groaned miserably as he retreated to the toilet to blow his nose. How ironic that the only thing that might have helped him, was equally irritating to him. He could just imagine chasing Silviu away with a bouquet of purple flowers, the vampire sneezing uncontrollably.

"Roses, perhaps?" Petri asked. He said, " _Orchideous,_ " again, and this time thorny red roses shot from his wand. Harry's nose did not try running away this time, but as he reached cautiously to pick up a flower it was like the thorns had sensed him coming and moved themselves into the path of his hand. He winced at the deep cut on the pad of his finger. It burned horribly, and when he tried to wipe away his tears the burning feeling went into his eye.

He screamed.

"Don't touch your face, or anything, actually," Petri advised unnecessarily. Harry had figured that much out for himself. His eye still felt like it was on fire.

"What do I do?" Tears were streaming down his face and dripping from his chin, but he didn't dare move.

"It will fade," said Petri. How unhelpful.

Harry ran in the approximate direction of the toilet, again, and managed for his trouble to hit his head on the wall. He felt around until he managed to find the basin and dunked his face inside. It seemed to alleviate the pain a little.

Eventually, it did fade, as Petri had said, and a damp and displeased Harry returned to the room. "What am I supposed to do if all of his weaknesses are mine too?" He could just imagine shooting roses out of his wand, only to have Silviu levitate them all back at him. His eye twitched at the thought.

"There's holy water," said Petri. "You don't have any sympathetic magic to suppress in the first place, so it will not affect you."

"Great. Let's get some holy water, then," said Harry.

"Unfortunately, it is a restricted potion," said Petri, dashing the last of his hopes. "The best you can do is find some cleaning products that contain it. During the day it might be enough."

Something was better than nothing, and that was how they ended up at the Spiny Serpent Supply Shop at the corner of Knockturn and Diagon. Just outside the shop there were some gigantic vase-like cauldrons of Frank's Fertilization Fluid, for gardening, that were on sale.

Wind chimes tinkled as they pushed open the door. It was very dim inside, the only source of illumination the weak sunlight filtering through the grimy windows and a single, black candle at the counter. Behind it, on a tall wooden stool, sat a toothless hag wearing a disproportionately large pointed hat that covered her eyes.

They split up to search the shelves for cleaning potions. Harry saw things like Slug and Snail solution and Flesh-Eating Slug Repellent near the entrance. On the opposite shelf there were remedies like burn healing paste, Pepper-Up potion, and skeleton restoration elixir ("compare to Skele-Gro!" read the lurid green label). Skele-Gro was also available on the highest shelf, but it cost twice as much.

"Here," Petri called, and Harry followed his voice up several aisles. Petri was holding a tall flask of a bright blue potion that looked like muggle dish soap. Harry glanced past him and froze.

At the end of the aisle stood a familiar woman, trailing long fingers over a row of potion bottles. There was a shining silver pin in her otherwise unkempt hair. It was Annette Yaxley, or Vlaicu, or whatever her name was. Harry was sure of it.

"This one is only one percent," said Petri, pulling Harry over to show him the label. Harry nodded distractedly, trying to move surreptitiously closer to the woman. Nonchalantly, he grabbed another potion of the shelf to look at.

"Two percent," he said, finding the warning label and locating "purification potion" on the list.

"Are you looking for a strong cleaning potion?"

Harry turned to find the woman looking directly at him. It was definitely Annette; the long, pale scar across her swarthy face confirmed it.

"Mrs. Skower's Magical Mess Remover is the best one," she told them.

Harry put the potion in his hand back on the shelf and took down a bottle of Mrs. Skower's. It was labelled with the same green ink as the skeleton potion he'd seen earlier. Annette was right; it was five percent purification potion, more than twice as much as the others.

"Thanks," he said, looking over at her uncertainly. Unable to think of something better, he blurted, "I like your pin."

"Thank you," said Annette. "It was a gift from a friend."

Harry fought the urge to cringe.

Then it occurred to him that something was off. Nalrod hadn't had the opportunity to give his present to Annette. He had been attacked by Silviu on his way there. The best explanation, then, was that Silviu had delivered the pin to her, just like with the Gringotts letter.

Did Annette even know that Nalrod was dead? Harry studied her face, and saw the same apathy he'd noticed in the memories. It didn't seem to be grief.

"Your friend," Harry said, pausing a little, but then overcoming his hesitation. "Was he a goblin? It's just, it looks goblin-made."

"A goblin?" she asked, looking so surprised that Harry almost thought he had made a mistake. "No, he's..." she seemed to realise something, because she glanced around quickly, and then said, "Sorry, I need to go," and practically ran out of the shop.

"Was that Annette Vlaicu?" Petri asked.

"You know her?" Harry asked in astonishment.

"In the same way you do, I imagine," said Petri, and Harry remembered that Petri had been the first to do necromancy on Nalrod.

"She had Nalrod's pin," Harry said. "I mean, the one he wanted to give her."

"Hm," said Petri, and took the bottle of Mrs. Skower's out of Harry's hands. Harry glanced at the hag behind the counter, who was very purposefully not looking in their direction, and fell silent.

"Ten knuts," said the hag. Petri paid her and they hurried out of the shop.

"She was human?" Petri asked as they walked down the alley.

"Huh?" asked Harry.

"Annette Vlaicu, she was human?" Petri repeated impatiently.

"Oh, uh, yes? I think so," said Harry. "Nalrod mentioned she was, too."

"Odd. I assumed she was a vampire as well," said Petri.

"Why?" Harry asked. Petri looked at him oddly, like it was obvious.

"Silviu Vlaicu," Petri said. "I thought she was related to him."

Vlaicu—that was Silviu's surname? Harry was thrown. Then he remembered, "Yaxley. She used to be Annette Yaxley, but in the memory, in one of Nalrod's memories, she said it wasn't her name any more."

"Ah," said Petri, as if everything had become clear.

"What is it?" Harry asked.

"She must have been disowned," said Petri. "Yaxley is a pure-blood family name, I believe. They would not agree with mixing with vampires and goblins."

Harry wasn't convinced by this explanation. Why had Annette taken on Silviu's surname? Were they married? But if that was the case, why would Nalrod have been interested in her? It would make sense then that Silviu was so negative about Nalrod, but something was still not right.

Annette was poor, Harry remembered. If she and Silviu were married, or something of the sort, surely that would not be the case? Silviu owned a shop and land that he rented out. He definitely had a substantial amount of gold to his name.

Something definitely did not add up.


	20. Spirit

Strands of moonlight pierced through the mist like so many glistening spiderwebs. Where it touched his clammy skin he felt a feverish glow, and it prompted him to advance with increasing desperation, heedless of the ice and snow crunching between his bare toes.

The shade of a bent yew yawned widely like the maw of gigantic beast, lined with frosty fangs. He entered the tunnel unflinchingly. On the other side, he emerged in a puddle of harsh white light that poured from the gibbous moon overhead.

"It's always daylight," said Harry to himself, standing in only his nightgown in the clearing behind the spired mausoleum. The tip of its pointed shadow threatened to spear his foot. In the distance, an owl hooted, the only sound in an otherwise silent night.

"Daylight?" asked the swirling mist around his ankles.

"When I see you," said Harry, looking straight ahead at the dusty brick wall that demarcated the land of the dead.

"When you are able to see me," corrected the shadow extending beneath him.

Gradually, Harry became aware that he was not dreaming. The numbness in his feet had given way to a prickling pain. He blinked blearily; it was too bright to focus.

The shadow rose up and seemed to coalesce, blocking the light. Silviu's pallid face took after the moon, his sunken cheeks like grey craters. His eyes were dying embers. They glinted red, but a moment later cooled to coal black.

The chill of the winter night struck Harry all at once, and he stumbled back, unable to comprehend how he had come to be there. His frozen feet could not support him, and he toppled into the snow, which cut him with his icy corners and seeped unforgivingly through his nightgown. The shock of it only encouraged his panic and he kicked and clawed at the too-yielding ground, finding perilously little purchase.

Silviu stepped forward, unhurriedly, and easily overtook Harry's paltry attempt at retreat. The vampire bent down and, in one swift motion, picked him up without breaking his stride.

Harry was so surprised that his arms snapped forward reflexively to wrap around Silviu's torso. Then he remembered that he was trying to escape.

Twisting and turning did nothing but encourage a tighter grip, and soon Harry was more occupied managing to breathe than he was with struggling. In between moments of tunnelling vision, he expected a sharp pain in his neck. None came.

Silviu relaxed his hold enough for him to catch his breath. He finally noticed that the vampire was warm, far warmer than the night air, though that was not much of a feat. Still, it meant that he was full of blood, stolen blood.

Harry considered his options. He wasn't anywhere near physically strong enough to break the vampire's grip, and even if he were, he wasn't fast enough to run away either, especially not when he knew Silviu could apparate.

Where were they going? How had Silviu—how had it come to this? Harry was sure he had been sleeping in his bed just as always. Petri had wards to stop people from breaking in. Had Silviu found some loophole because he was the landlord?

Harry tried to focus on the present; it didn't matter what had happened. He needed to escape. But he was wandless, and magic did not seem to be eagerly jumping to his aid.

His breath was unpleasantly cut off again as the world went dark. It felt like he was suddenly swimming in tar.

He coughed and sputtered, realising only after several long seconds that he was choking on thin air, warm air.

It had been apparition, but nothing like the apparition he'd experienced before, besides that it was equally, if not more, unpleasant. He recognised the back room of the Coffin House. It looked exactly the same as it had months ago, when Petri and Harry had come to look at model coffin homes.

Silviu set him down on his feet. Harry was half flummoxed, half furious, but the latter feeling was quickly winning out now that it was evident that Silviu wasn't interested in _simply_ eating him.

"What do you want?" Harry demanded.

"What do _you_ want?" Silviu asked, absurdly.

"Stuff it," said Harry. "You're the one who—who kidnapped me."

"Oh, but you can leave now, if that's what you want," said Silviu, making a show of stepping aside. That was rich, after he'd apparated them across a veritable snowfield. Harry fingered the thin material of his nightgown, still damp from the snow and really appropriate only for the magically warmed indoors, and scoffed. Silviu tilted his head in a birdlike gesture. "I shall take you back, if it's what you want," he amended ."Just say the word. And you will not need to hear what I have to say. It's so very hard to get a hold of you, and I daresay it will become even harder."

Harry wanted to demand to go home, half out of spite if nothing else, but his curiosity overwhelmed him and he hated himself for it because he could see just what the vampire was trying to do. He wasn't a stupid child.

Wavering in indecision for a few moments, he finally settled on saying, "You bit me."

A flash of surprise passed across Silviu's face, and Harry felt a little triumphant. Had the vampire really thought a memory charm would be enough?

"How did you know?" he asked, and Harry felt a little incredulous. Perhaps it was risky, given present company, but he pulled down the floppy collar of his nightgown and showed his neck, where he knew the scar was clearly visible.

Silviu advanced, and Harry stepped back and fumbled to hide it, but the vampire's hand shot out and clamped onto his shoulder, keeping the fabric and Harry's hand pinned. Harry tried to get away, but he stopped once he realised that Silviu's intent look was one of deep thought, and not transfixion.

"This is… odd," said Silviu, finally letting go of him and standing back. Despite himself, Harry quickly adjusted his collar. "Normally it heals to the size of a literal pinprick. No matter how many times. Even after death."

Harry shuddered a little as Silviu touched his hand lightly to his own neck, but he felt angry more than anything else. Nothing ever seemed to go "normally" for him.

"You must've done something wrong," he said.

"I don't remember anything different from usual," said Silviu. Usual? Did he usually lurk about in graveyards and attack children?

Actually, he probably did, Harry reflected, feeling a little ill.

"I don't remember anything properly," Harry said. "No thanks to you."

"But you remember something?" Silviu asked sharply.

"Memory charms aren't very precise," said Harry, quoting Petri on the matter.

"Memory charms don't break on their own," said Silviu. His eyes narrowed, and Harry could almost see the suspicion in the furrowed lines of his brow. "The only known way to reverse them is through mental trauma, like torture."

Suddenly, Harry had a very good idea of what had happened to the memory charm. The cry of _"Crucio!"_ and the incomprehensible pain, only possible to grasp in the moment. It was like he'd traded one memory for another, neither good.

Silviu seemed to read something in his expression, because he said, "I won't ask what you experienced, but if I may, isn't it your guardian's responsibility to protect you from these things?"

Harry's mind immediately flashed to Diagon Alley, Petri's hesitation to leave, his own joy at finally being alone—Petri had been trying to protect him from things that entire time, but Harry had somehow undone it with his one mistake. He tried to understand what it was that Silviu was playing at.

Why kidnap him now? How had he even done it? Harry guessed that something had changed after their last encounter, because before that Silviu had either no interest in or no ability to get to him.

"What's your point?" Harry asked, lost in a sea of unknowns and grasping tightly to the only solid thing he had—indignation.

"My point is that you're being exploi—used. You're far too young to be in any apprenticeship, let alone—"

"What? Charms? I'm old enough to do magic," said Harry, unconsciously reaching for his wand and then aborting the motion as subtly as he could when he realised that, of course, he did not have it. His fingers clenched into a fist instead.

"Not _charms_. Necromancy," said Silviu. Harry paused too long, long enough for it to be incriminating.

"That's not—er, what?" he said, but it sounded somewhat flat and unconvincing even to his own ears. Nonetheless, he _was_ confused.

"Come now," said Silviu, a little derision colouring his tone. "A wizard, pretending to be a half-vampire, and the Ministry of Magic believes him?"

"But you—they believed you, didn't they?" Harry protested.

"It's not the wizard half that's hard to fake," said Silviu, and Harry felt the condescension like a blow. Maybe he had had it in his head that the Ministry was just incompetent and careless, but he honestly had not considered that Petri had done something other than lie through his artificially pointed teeth.

Still, another possibility immediately opened up to him, and he seized it. "A _confundus_ charm would have done it," he said. He wasn't sure why he was defending Petri, exactly, but he didn't think Silviu was on his side. Not any more.

The vampire looked a little surprised, and Harry counted it as a victory, whether for the argument or the fact that he knew about the charm at all. Of course, Harry only knew of it because he'd Petri use it, and it was obviously advanced, but that meant it was still something he'd learned on account of his apprenticeship. Silviu had no right to be commenting about his age, given that he obviously wasn't too young to be kidnapped on a whim.

"That isn't the point," Silviu finally said, shaking his head. "Do you think I don't know what's going on in my own properties? Somebody like that—someone like that is not to be trifled with."

"You're trifling with him," said Harry, though he felt a spark of hope at the thought that Silviu was perhaps somewhat afraid of Petri. If that was the case, however, the vampire's point remained opaque.

"I'm trying to help you," said Silviu. "Some things are worth it. You-"

"Help me? You're not helping me," Harry cried, "I don't want your help."

"No, listen! Just listen to me," Silviu was saying, and Harry clenched his teeth to cage a frustrated scream. It wouldn't help him here. "Your parents, they," Silviu paused, narrowed his eyes, and then continued, nodding to himself, "no, your relatives, they didn't want you, right?"

Despite himself, Harry found his anger stilling momentarily, overcome by curiosity.

"They left you, and this man, Peters, he takes you in and promises you a better life, a useful life. It is better, better than what you had before."

"How do you know that?" escaped Harry's mouth before he noticed that it had opened.

Silviu ignored him. "But better isn't the same as good. There are other options. You don't have to stay under his thumb."

"What, are you going to suggest that I stay with you instead?" Harry interrupted. It was clear now where this argument was going, and he felt that he was right on target even before Silviu's face grew pinched with chagrin. "That's hypocra-hypo—er, that's just as bad."

"Hypocritical," said Silviu, almost under his breath. "It isn't. It's entirely different. I would provide you food and shelter, and when you're old enough, employment. And I don't ask anything of you except—"

"Blood," said Harry. The pieces were all there; they were just scrambled and strewn everywhere. No children allowed to live _officially_ in Knockturn, hags, vampires, the missing children, Annette ex-Yaxley, and now this.

"Except your word," Silviu continued sternly, "that you will consider our company as family and contribute to its continued well-being."

Harry frowned at the vagueness of this promise. It did seem too elaborate to be some kind of hoax or trap, as Silviu had already proven that he had enough sheer strength to kill Harry a dozen times over or otherwise extort him, and had no reason to go to such roundabout lengths.

Or did he?

"And what about my master?" Harry asked.

"Just your word, and we can hide you so well that it will be like you never existed," said Silviu, and Harry was reminded uncomfortably of the _fidelius_ charm, and how it was already doing practically the same thing, in plain sight.

"We?" Harry asked

"My company," said Silviu. Did he mean the Coffin House? "We are nearly a hundred strong, and own the majority of Knockturn Alley." Not just the Coffin House, then, or at least it was news to Harry that the dingy funeral parlour had a hundred employees.

"I don't understand," Harry said. "Who are you?"

Perhaps that was a funny way to put the question, because Silviu did not answer immediately and instead appeared somewhat thrown.

Harry tried to clarify: "I mean, why are you doing this? Nothing you're saying makes any sense. Why do you want to help me so badly?" Harry couldn't quite keep the word "help" from coming out derisively, even though he was genuinely curious.

"Why wouldn't I?" Silviu asked. "It's—I consider it my duty to help everybody in this alley. In fact I—"

"My master lives in this alley," Harry pointed out, uninterested in hearing the rest of Silviu's spurious moral claims.

"Have I not helped him as well?" Silviu asked, leaning back as if perplexed. "I have never stood in his way until now, now that he has proven himself truly unfit as a guardian."

"What?" demanded Harry, nonplussed. "What did he do?" He was hardly surprised that Silviu thought Petri was an unfit guardian, as anybody could see that it was true, but more that Harry could not see what had changed.

"He left you alone, defenceless, at the mercy of goblins!" Silviu said, as if it were obvious.

Harry, for his part, was torn between exasperation and laughter. It was utterly ridiculous that Silviu was caught up over something so trivial. Sure, Harry had probably come close to dying once or twice, but it had been sheer luck, bad and good, that had put him into the situation and got him out. Petri had nothing to do with it at all.

So he decided to say as much. "I think you've got it all wrong," he said. "I mean I was just in Diagon Alley. People leave their kids in Diagon Alley all the time." Well, he wasn't sure of that, but it seemed plausible. "It was totally my fault I got mixed up in that goblin business."

"Your fault?" Silviu repeated incredulously. "You had your identity stolen. A goblin was traipsing around wearing your face doing who-knows-what while you were walking _Knockturn Alley_ all alone."

"I wasn't alone," Harry said.

"Oh, and pray tell, who was accompanying you?" Silviu asked.

"Er, Nic," said Harry. "He's, er, someone I met in Diagon Alley."

"A stranger," Silviu concluded, and Harry winced. That could have been better said. "First a goblin, then a strange man."

"What have you got against goblins?" Harry demanded, half curious and half aiming to derail Silviu from the topic of Nic.

"Goblins are selfish, greedy, and conniving, and that's all you can trust them to be. They're monsters who will go to any lengths to get what they want," said Silviu, mildly and with full assurance.

Harry opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Those were harsh words for someone who himself was, arguably, a monster.

The door flew open with a thud and Harry turned, half expecting to see Petri bursting in, wand blazing, but it was Annette. She stepped inside and made directly for Silviu, ignoring Harry entirely.

"Ettie?" said Silviu. "What is it? I'm busy right now-"

" _Stupefy!_ " Annette shouted, whipping her wand out so quickly that it wobbled alarmingly in the air. The red bolt struck true, however, and Silviu toppled over, an expression of shock frozen onto his face.

"Er," said Harry, glancing back and forth between Annette and the fallen vampire. Weren't they on the same side?

Annette said nothing and lowered her wand, though she did not put it away. Then she turned and her hand shot out, again with impressive alacrity, and closed around Harry's wrist. He pulled back instinctively, but found her grip unyielding.

"Come on," she said hoarsely, tugging him toward the door. She snatched up a cloak that had been hanging from the handle on the other side and tried to throw it over her shoulders with one hand, before glancing at Harry and then tossing it over him instead.

"Thanks," he muttered in surprise, tugging it out of his face and into a better position as they crossed the main room of the Coffin House.

The shop was brightly lit, though empty of customers, and Harry hazarded a guess that Annette had been staffing it, unless Silviu had left it open and unattended in favour of committing an abduction. Indeed, as they exited the shop, Annette struck her wand against the window display so that it read "CLOSED." The letters melted into a line but then seemed reluctant to form the word, and it took her several tries to coax them into the right shape. She glanced about nervously all the while, as if expecting Silviu to spring from the back room at any moment. Who knew how long the spell she had cast would hold?

Harry had half a mind to tear his hand out of hers and make a run for it, but curiosity won out and he took the opportunity to whisper questions instead.

"I thought you and Silviu were friends?" he said as Annette slammed the front door behind them, abruptly cutting off the sound of its tolling bell. They set off at a fast walk down the alley, which, as was typical, was lit only by the glow of the moon. It was absolutely freezing, compared to the balmy, regulated temperature of the shop, and the cloak was only helping his upper body. Harry's bare feet were already going numb again, but he told himself that this was loads better than being trapped with a severely misguided vampire.

"Friends?" Annette repeated, as if she were asking herself. Consternation twisted the scar across her nose into a jagged crevice. "No. Not friends. Company."

"Company? Like the shop?" Harry asked, though he was sure that couldn't be it.

"Shops," said Annette, but she was shaking her head. "It's a vampire company."

"What?" said Harry, his brain conjuring up stupid images of a row of Silvius being produced on a factory assembly line.

"Sort of like a family," said Annette.

Harry thought he remembered Silviu saying something to that effect.

"But you knocked him out!" Harry said. Annette snorted.

"I'm angry with him," she said, "but I can't let him get himself killed. He doesn't know what he's doing, antagonising a necromancer. He always thinks he does but he doesn't."

Harry wondered how everybody and their uncle apparently knew about Petri's being a necromancer. Wasn't it supposed to be a secret, seeing how it was extremely illegal?

At any rate, Harry was sceptical about Annette's claim. Silviu seemed to know full well what he was doing, and simply did not care. Petri did not seem like the type to go for revenge, anyway. Harry thought that if Silviu really did manage to hide him away or something, that Petri was just as liable to cut his losses and leave, "not being able to afford to lose another apprentice" or not.

Annette pushed him suddenly into an alley between two shops and motioned for him to stand behind a dustbin. The sound of approaching footsteps reached his ears a moment later. Harry tensed up and tried not to breathe, wondering if Silviu had caught up to them and was imminently going to fish him out of his corner like he was a wayward cat.

The footsteps stopped, but it was a woman who spoke.

"Hey Ettie, what are you doing out here at this time of night?" Whoever it was sounded simply curious.

There was no response for a rather long moment, and then Annette said, "I wanted some fresh air."

"Couldn't sleep, eh?" asked the other woman, and then continued, "Well how can anybody with Silviu keeping that bloody awful schedule of his? I swear I kept waking up at noon every day for a week after he had us all go to the bank. And then I couldn't move or fall back asleep again. It was awful."

"You still have trouble moving during the day?" asked Annette. "I thought he showed everyone how to do it."

At this point, Harry guessed that the other woman was a vampire, and doubled down on his attempts to breathe very shallowly.

"It's bloody hard," said the woman. "I'd like to see you try it."

"I do it every day," said Annette blandly.

"Oh you—you know what I mean. You'll turn into a hag if you keep spending all your time with them."

"I'm not interested in changing," said Annette. "Not into a hag either. Anyway, I don't want to keep you, if you're going to Elaine's."

It was an awkward sort of goodbye, Harry thought, almost a dismissal, but the other woman took it in stride and with cheer.

"You're damn right I am," she said. "Have yourself a wonderful night and get some sleep."

"Thanks, and you as well," said Annette, and there was a long pause as she stepped carefully back into the alleyway with the dustbins and waited.

"All right, let's go," she murmured, and Harry straightened himself with a wince from where he had practically become frozen solid.

"Er, could you cast a warming charm?" he asked as he hobbled after her, somewhat concerned for his toes, and how attached to his body they were liable to be after this adventure.

"Sorry," said Annette, "but I'm out of magic."

Harry thought she was joking for a moment, but the contrite, slightly anxious look on her face disabused him of that notion. Her furrowed brow relaxed slightly, and then she took out her wand and held it out. It was a long, rough wand that swayed as they walked and up close, Harry thought it might be made of a piece of bark rather than solid wood.

"Maybe you could cast it yourself," she said.

Harry was astonished to realise that she was holding out her wand to let him use it, even waving it impatiently at him. Then again, if she was telling the truth about being out of magic, he supposed it was little more than a stick in her hands.

Unfortunately, he didn't think her wand would be much help to him, either.

"I don't know that charm yet," he admitted.

"Well I don't know it either. Never needed something like that," she said, turning away and pocketing her wand. Harry almost regretted not taking it, and then proceeded to feel awful for even considering it.

"Oh. Where are we going?" Harry asked, hoping she had a more definitive plan than just "away."

"Gringotts," said Annette, and Harry almost stopped, except that his feet continued to move without his conscious direction. "You'll be out of his reach there."

Gringotts? He couldn't go back there—could he?

Even as he reasoned that nobody had seen his face, he felt the press of fear and the phantom sense of stone walls closing in on him, trapping him. He opened his mouth but found nothing to say, unable to produce a coherent argument for why they could not go there, but still sensible enough to know that an argument would be necessary.

He could wait until they were close. But they were already close. The damp cobblestones glistened steadily brighter as they neared Knockturn's end, where Diagon Alley glowed under the soft twinkle of hundreds of hovering fairy lights. Before Harry could get another thought in, they were turning the corner.

Silviu was waiting for them, right in front of Gringotts. Harry's heart sank to the bottom of his stomach and he felt frozen inside and out, but Annette did not break her stride and made straight for the vampire.

"Ettie, what do you think you're doing?" Silviu demanded as she reached forward and grabbed a fistful of his cloak. With her other hand she reached beneath it and then produced his wand, which she unceremoniously tossed over her shoulder into a pile of dirty snow.

Harry gaped.

"What do I think I'm doing? What do _you_ think you're doing?" she cried. "You're abusing your power. You think just because you're chair, you can do whatever you want? You're just like the others."

"I'm not—I wasn't—Ettie, please," said Silviu, and Harry was shocked to see that he had leaned backwards as if to escape her, his hands held up in a placating gesture.

"You're just like them," she repeated, and Silviu flinched back from each word like it was a blow.

Harry regained his wits and inched slowly towards the indentation in the snow where Silviu's wand had landed, keeping one ear on the argument.

"Let me explain, please," Silviu was saying.

"Explain what? Why you murdered Nalrod?" Annette asked coldly.

Despite himself, Harry looked up at that. Annette had stepped back from Silviu, but he remained with his back against the white marble of the bank. There was an expression of tremendous dismay on his face, and Harry imagined he would have blanched if he could get any paler.

"Did you think I wouldn't find out?" Annette pressed. "You'd just get rid of him quietly?"

"No! No. That wasn't it at all," Silviu protested. "You didn't see what he did. He was impersonating—"

"Impersonating somebody's a capital crime now?" said Annette.

"He was impersonating Harry," Silviu continued, "and coming into the Alley. He was threatening the company!"

"Harry is not even part of the company," said Annette. "Stop acting like he is. You killed Nalrod because you don't like him. Just because you didn't like him."

"No," said Silviu firmly. "That's not why. You know Gringotts wants us to declare commercial vaults. Rate hiking didn't work so then they tried bribery, as if that's any better, and finally they sent him to spy on us, probably for blackmail!"

"That's..." Annette paused and actually seemed to consider his words.

Harry crouched down and snatched Silviu's wand, grimacing at the grainy mud that immediately coated his palm. He had no pockets so he settled for holding it ready, just under his cloak, though he wasn't sure he could even use it. It felt like dead wood in his hand.

Now for the escape. He considered whether he could simply walk back out of the alley without either of them noticing. Possibly, but it seemed risky. He certainly couldn't outrun Silviu, and hiding in Knockturn also seemed foolish. But Annette had been helping him before, so perhaps she could continue to hold him off, though that wasn't something he could count on.

"I don't think that's right," said Annette finally. "You have a point, but it was just a coincidence. Nalrod was on his own. You didn't have nearly enough evidence to do what you did."

"There was plenty of evidence," said Silviu. "It's possible I made a mistake, but I—"

" _Stupefy!_ "

A red bolt of light struck Silviu on the side and he was knocked out for the second time that night. Petri emerged from behind a white pillar, wand out, and cast the stunning spell again on the already unconscious vampire, presumably for security. Palpable relief flooded Harry at the sight of him.

"Er, hi," said Harry, when Petri did not say anything. He glanced up at Annette and added, "she, er, helped me escape. From Silviu. I mean Silviu kidnapped me, and then we tried to escape, but he found us..."

"I am aware," said Petri, and Harry stopped babbling. "We are going home."

With that, Petri turned and began to walk, clearly expecting them to follow. Harry took one step before his wits caught up to him.

"Home? In Knockturn Alley?" he demanded. Silviu would find them again instantly when he woke up!

"Yes," said Petri, and his tone brooked no argument. Every ounce of relief fled instantly from Harry again, and he clenched his fists tightly. Even the feeling of the vampire's wand in his hand offered little security. Annette glanced back at Silviu's prone form for several moments, but she said nothing and followed Petri towards Knockturn.

They strolled down Knockturn Alley in the pitch darkness, the festive illumination of Diagon Alley long behind them and the moon hidden behind a mass of rolling storm clouds. Petri did not so much as cast a wand-lighting charm.

Though Harry remained extremely on edge the entire way, they reached the graveyard with no incident and navigated through the rows of headstones unmolested.

Annette was still with them, but as Petri made no protest, Harry decided not to bring it up. She followed them into their casket home.

"Won't he know to come here?" Harry asked.

"The protections are fully secure," said Petri.

"How did Silviu get me, then?" Harry was anxious to know.

Petri raised his hand and tapped the side of his neck, and Harry mirrored the motion to find the twin bumps of the vampire bite still rough under his thumb.

"I underestimated the strength of the curse," said Petri. "You must begin learning to resist compulsion—resist the imperius curse—immediately." He glanced sharply at Annette. "Perhaps you could give him some advice."

Annette flinched. "You knew?" she asked in a small voice.

"Those under the imperius curse do not usually go above and beyond their orders," said Petri. "Thank you for retrieving my apprentice."

"Please don't change Silviu's fate," said Annette.

"Change his fate?" Petri asked, and if Harry had not lived with the man every day for more than a year he would have thought him actually confused.

Annette wavered for a moment, but then she straightened her shoulders and looked up from under her long fringe.

"My father was—is—a necromancer, so I know these things," she said.

"A necromancer," Petri repeated. He smiled. "Necromancy is not my speciality," he said, "and as such there will be no fate changing."

"Thank you," said Annette. Harry was shocked that she actually believed him, just like that. Harry would bet everything he had that Petri was going to go right on ahead and change whatever fates he liked, whatever that meant exactly, the moment she left.

"You are free to go," said Petri. Annette nodded and made for the door, though not without a long look at Harry, who still had Silviu's wand in hand. Petri followed her gaze and said nothing, however, and she finally left without another word.

Harry felt suddenly exhausted, and collapsed onto a nearby chair. His eyes ached in their sockets but his mind was still whirling with bewilderment.

"Go to bed," Petri advised, and Harry mustered up the willpower to stand and then roll onto his bed. He jerked in surprise as a scouring charm hit his feet and tickled the soles. Vaguely, it occurred to him that they must have been filthy.

He woke suddenly, feeling as if he had not slept at all, but the room was well-illuminated by bluebell flames as it usually was during the day. Eldritch blobs filled his vision, filtering through the grime-encrusted glasses that had remained on his face overnight. Something was digging into his side, and he recalled that he still had Silviu's wand. Blearily, he patted the side table for his own, and traded them, before checking the time. It was already nine in the morning.

As he rolled off the bed and to his feet, taking a moment to polish his glasses on the hem of his nightgown, Harry saw Petri sitting at the table, reading the newspaper. Presently the man tossed the paper to the side and picked up his wand. Harry tensed as it pointed towards him.

"We have work to do," said Petri, in lieu of a "good morning," and then added, _"Imperio,_ "

Harry immediately relaxed. In fact, he felt perhaps more content than he had ever felt before, as if he were floating on a soft cloud of bliss. All his worries had disappeared.

He noticed vaguely that Petri had begun to move toward the trunk, and moved to follow him. They descended and stopped in the room with the blood door and the stone table, where Petri twirled his wand and conjured a thin snake.

 _Cast the cruciatus curse on the snake_ , came a thought in Harry's head. For a moment, the thought seemed very odd, but then the moment passed. Of course that was what he wanted to do.

He pointed his wand at the snake.

" _Crucio_!" he cried, and the snake began writhing and contorting in incredible ways.

"Pain, danger, danger, escape, escape!" it screamed.

Shock broke through to his faculties, and Harry dropped his wand to the floor. The snake tried to slither away but Petri stunned it.

 _Pick up the wand,_ Harry thought to himself. That was sensible enough. He bent down and picked it up.

_Cast the cruciatus curse again._

Where had that thought come from? Harry frowned. Why would he do something like that?

_Cast the cruciatus curse._

He had suddenly the thought that he was going mad, and then threw his wand away.

"Good," said Petri, and then all Harry's feelings came rushing back in a crushing avalanche, sending him reeling.

"What was that? Was that the imperius curse?" he demanded, rubbing at his temples. "Did I cast the cruciatus?" He felt the urge to retch, and had to swallow several times. Then he looked back down for the talking snake, but it was gone. Petri must have banished it.

"That was the imperius curse," Petri confirmed.

"How did I cast the cruciatus?" Harry asked. He was almost certain, despite that he remembered it happening, that it was impossible for him to have done it.

"You cast nothing. I cast the cruciatus through your wand," said Petri, allaying his fears somewhat. "The imperius curse is one of the most powerful and dangerous spells in existence. Not only can it force the victim to do anything within his own physical limits, it also lends him the full will of the caster. But as you have seen, it can be resisted."

"How?" Harry asked. "It didn't feel like I did anything."

"Will. Your will must become too strong to be dominated," said Petri. "It is the easiest with your deep convictions. Few casters can overpower the victim's will for long in such a case."

Harry felt a little better at hearing that he couldn't be made to do horrible things by just anybody, and after experiencing it for himself, even if he could not explain how he had managed to resist the curse.

"In other cases, it takes extensive practice," said Petri. Harry did not like the sound of that. "We will try again later. That woman, Annette, must have had years of experience."

"Years?" said Harry. "You mean Silviu—"

"No," said Petri. "Her father, I expect."

Right. The necromancer. Harry felt very ill at the thought that anybody would cast unforgivables on his own child. Weren't parents supposed to love their children? Harry wondered if Petri would treat him the same way if he were the man's own son. He quickly cut short that errant trail of thought.

"I am surprised that he disowned her, after all that," Petri mused, as if that were the biggest problem with her story. "She must be a powerful witch."

This remark reminded Harry of something Annette had said last night. "I think there's something wrong with her magic," he said. "She said she used it all up, I guess to knock Silviu out."

"What? That's nonsense," said Petri. "You can't use up all your magic. Your flow is constantly..."

Harry waited for him to finish, but nothing was forthcoming. A contemplative cast had fallen over Petri's face, and he drummed his fingers absently against his thigh. Harry was dying to prompt him to continue, but had enough experience to swallow his impatience.

Finally, Petri said, "I think I understand," and strode toward the back room. "Come along."

Harry scrambled after him, wondering if some sort of fate changing was about to commence.

To his surprise, a variety of materials were already strewn all over the worktable in the back, and it looked for all the world as if Petri had been in the middle of some complicated arcane working. The pensieve sat in the centre, half the symbols on the surface glowing silver, and there were parchments covered in enchanter's shorthand littered everywhere, including on the floor.

Petri waved his wand and several disparate pages zoomed into his outstretched hand, explaining the lack of need for any form of organisation. He skimmed the first, dropped it with little concern for where it landed, and scrutinised the second more closely.

"I want you try reconstruction again," said Petri. "Look for information about that woman, Annette."

"Reconstruction?" said Harry. "You mean like we did with Malfoy and the Dark Lord?"

"Yes. Exactly that," said Petri as he tapped his wand repeatedly against the side of the pensieve. Different combinations of symbols flashed each time. "You seemed to have a talent for it."

Harry, who was fairly certain that he had had no idea what he had been doing at the time, did not share Petri's apparent confidence in his abilities. As he approached the table and debated whether to voice any concerns, Petri addressed them without his prompting.

"It is a matter of being curious in the right way," he said, gesturing towards the pensieve, which had stopped glowing. "It is ready with our vampire friend's memory. The last thing is your blood."

Harry connected the dots. "You mean you already changed his fate? Last night? So what you told Annette was true, but..." It was true in the worst possible way, but Harry did not know how to say that without showing obvious disapproval.

"I changed very little," said Petri, and held out his hand expectantly. "These things are delicate. He simply believes now that you are already part of his company."

"What?" Harry demanded, hardly noticing as Petri drew blood with the tip of his wand. "How does that help? And what _is_ this company supposed to be? I still don't understand at all."

Petri ignored him and distributed blood around the pensieve before consulting a nearby scrap of parchment and casting a continuous slew of spells in what Harry now recognised as an enchantment. Then, as the carvings began glowing uniformly silver once more, Petri's hand shot out and caught the back of Harry's head, and with a quick shove sent him careening into the depths of the bowl of silvery memory.

Harry flailed as he fell through the darkness, before his wits caught up to him and he stilled, finding himself suddenly on his feet in a murky grey version of the interior of the trunk. Remembering something of what had happened last time, he looked around for an apparition of Silviu.

A gaunt, lanky teenager was skulking warily by the door. His eyes were staring ahead, and Harry felt watched, even though he guessed that he was just an invisible viewer of the memory.

"I'm looking for information about Annette. Er, Annette Vlaicu. Or Yaxley," said Harry a little lamely.

"Annette? Who's that?" asked the disturbingly young Silviu, and Harry jumped as dark eyes fixed on his form. Was this supposed to happen?

"She's, er, she's part of your company?" said Harry, entirely uncertain. Silviu blinked.

"My company," he repeated, and then his eyes unfocused, and a familiar mist rolled into the scene to obscure everything before dissolving into a dark but richly upholstered chamber. A variety of very thin, pale people with indistinct features were lounging about on uncomfortable-looking wooden chairs and entertaining themselves with books or card games. Silviu was standing at the very end, apparently being told off by an older man who was seated with his feet up on a chaise that was draped with shimmering, regal fabrics. Harry caught sight of clawed fingers as he gesticulated and guessed that the man, and probably everybody in the room, was a vampire.

They were speaking rapidly in what was presumably Romanian, which was inconvenient, as Harry had no idea what was going on, except that there was palpable tension in the air, laced with undercurrents of anger and fear.

Anger won out as Silviu shouted back at the other vampire. There was a long pause where they only stared at each other, and then Harry almost staggered backwards at the spike of terror that lanced through him. The older vampire had shot up to his feet, and Silviu had been picked up by the lapels of his fancy coat and slammed against the nearest wall with bruising force. Harry was vividly reminded of what had happened to Nalrod, and he realised suddenly that this Silviu, the one in the memory, was no vampire. Not yet.

The vampire said something in a quiet and serious tone, and Silviu nodded frantically, apparently chastised, and was let go. He slid slowly to the floor as the vampire simply stalked away, drawing the gaze of everyone else in the room after him, and Harry still felt lingering fear that did not belong to him.

"My company," said Silviu again in English, and Harry noticed that they were back in the ghostly workshop, and Silviu, who sat huddled against the wall, stared plaintively up at him.

"Er, that was your company?" Harry asked, but Silviu hardly seemed to hear him. "Before? What about now? In Knockturn Alley?"

This avenue of questioning drew no reaction at all from the human Silviu, and Harry tried not to think about how he was doing a rather grand job of failing Petri's expectations, and instead wracked his brain for something else to try.

Lucius Malfoy's father hadn't seemed to have any trouble bringing up memories at any time in the past, but perhaps it was different because Silviu was only dead by a technical definition.

"How did you become a vampire?" Harry asked.

He was hit by an extraordinary cocktail of grief and anger that robbed him of his breath. Mist seemed to explode into the room, and evaporated just as quickly as it had come to reveal a carved stone balcony at the side of a castle, with a moonlit view over a scenic valley, complete with farmhouses and a meandering creek. Silviu stood at the railing, staring at a letter clutched in his hand. As Harry watched, he crumpled up the parchment, grinding it together with both hands, and then tossed it furiously over the side. His heavy breathing puffed visibly into the cold evening air. He stared down at his open palms, as if having never seen them before.

Then, to Harry's shock, Silviu threw _himself_ off the balcony, just like that. Harry's heart skipped a beat as he stared at the spot through the railing where the older boy's coattails had fluttered for a second as he fell.

Harry was afraid to take a proper look down over the edge, but was spared the need to as mist swallowed up the floor beneath him and then deposited him in solid darkness.

At first, Harry wondered if perhaps the memory had ended and he was stuck in the space between, but then he heard the murmur of voices. Unfortunately, they were still in Romanian.

A candle flared, and after a moment Harry's eyes adjusted to the dim, silvery illumination. The older vampire from before was there, holding up a candelabra and speaking rapidly at a box that Harry realised belatedly was a casket. He stepped closer.

Silviu was lying in the casket, no sign of having leapt off a high tower visible in his comportment except an obvious pallor indicative of death. In fact, his eyes were open and he was responding to the other vampire in a hoarse, defensive whisper. Harry had not been aware that one could become a vampire by falling from a great height.

"I haven't thought about that in a long while," said Silviu's voice from behind him, and Harry jumped and whirled around to find the familiar, adult and very vampiric Silviu standing there. Harry glanced back and saw that the apparitions of the other vampire and the young Silviu had vanished.

"Dragomir never did like me," Silviu mused, apparently unaware of Harry's presence.

Mist surrounded them, rolling and flickering but never clearing enough for a proper view. Harry caught a many glimpses of the other vampire, Dragomir, perhaps, sneering or yelling or otherwise looking displeased, and his hand flew up to clutch his neck when phantom pain flared across it as countless instances of Dragomir's teeth sinking into Silviu's throat were recalled in concert.

Not particularly interested in viewing any further similar experiences, Harry tried to prompt again, "Annette? Remember her?"

A vivid image of a girl, perhaps Harry's age, with a vicious scar across the bridge of her nose, materialised from the mist, followed by a plethora of shadowy corners and crooked buildings. It was Knockturn Alley, but gloomier and dirtier than Harry had ever seen it in real life.

" _Inimico!_ " the girl screamed suddenly, whipping out a familiar, springy wand. A searing bolt of light erupted from the tip and Harry flinched and shut his eyes instinctively before remembering that this was just a memory.

A lingering shimmering in the air suggested that Silviu had put up a shield charm, but the spell seemed to have burned right through it and struck him anyway, given the way he was screaming and writhing on the ground. The skin on his face rippled grotesquely, as if boiling.

"Ettie! What is going on?"

A woman burst out of the next building, and Harry struggled to find some place to put his eyes where there wouldn't be bare skin—he settled on the still-cursed Silviu.

"I defended us from the vampire," said Annette primly.

"Oh Merlin, oh Merlin, Merlin..." the woman muttered frantically. "Ettie, that's dark magic. We'll get in trouble. Ettie, make it stop, quickly!"

"I can't," said Annette.

"What do you mean you can't?" the woman demanded. In the corner of his eye Harry saw how she turned around, and then turned again, completing a helpless circle, her hands worrying at her voluminous hair.

Annette had put her wand away and was brazenly approaching the downed Silviu, who had ceased to flail and, trembling, was raising his wand to point it to his face.

Slowly, his body relaxed, and the unsightly bubbling of his flesh calmed, though there were angry red splotches and dark rings pockmarking every inch of his skin. As Harry watched, however, the marks faded and Silviu returned to an unblemished, if rather emaciated, state.

"My apologies," said Annette, not sounding sorry at all. "But your kind isn't welcome. Humans only."

Silviu only groaned, before slowly rolling over and pushing himself to his feet.

By this point the woman had apparently regained her senses. She grabbed Annette by the wrist and dragged her inside. Harry got a brief glimpse of a dim, smoky interior before the door slammed in his face.

There was a very familiar emblem hanging from a rusty nail, and Harry was astonished to see that they were standing in front of the White Wyvern.

It looked like—it looked like some sort of…

The scene changed, and they were inside, Harry was sure of it, even though nothing about the inn was recognisable besides its basic layout. There was tacky, gaudy fabric draping every surface, and thick smoke hung heavily in the air like a veil. There were women everywhere, women dressed like the one who had run out to reprimand Annette, and they lounged about the tables and cushions, murmuring in sultry voices to men, old men in stiff robes who had something like avarice glinting in their beady eyes. Harry followed movement in the corner of his eye and saw a plump, middle-aged man ascend the narrow staircase, a slender lady practically draped over his shoulder.

Silviu was at the counter, talking to a busty woman who nevertheless appeared to be wearing full dress robes, if a little lower-cut than strictly appropriate.

"I would like a room for the day," said Silviu, enunciating each word carefully, and then added, "Only a room."

The woman smirked at him. "That will be three sickles," she said, and traded a key for the money. "Room 247."

Silviu made straight for the staircase, giving the ladies wide berth, and Harry followed him upstairs.

The sounds of heavy breathing, unintelligible groans, and even occasional thumps surrounded them. Silviu's nose wrinkled heavily in disdain, and as soon as he opened the door to his room he waved his wand and spoke the silencing charm.

But there was already somebody inside.

"You!" yelled Annette, whipping the rag in her hand towards him in accusation. "Vampire! Get out!"

"I am, ah, paying customer," said Silviu, holding his wand to the side but at the ready, memory of being cursed clearly fresh on his mind. Annette's eyes narrowed into slits.

"I don't care. You can't have my mummy," said Annette.

Silviu's eyebrows shot up. "I simply need a place of resting," he said, obviously attempting to be placating.

"Are you sure?" Annette asked.

"Yes," said Silviu firmly.

" _Really_ sure," she pressed.

"Really sure," said Silviu, the corner of his lip curling in amusement. It was replaced by wariness when Annette abruptly whipped out her wand. She didn't cast any curse, however.

"I'll kill you if you touch my mummy," she said. "I know how, it's _Avada Kedavra_!"

A flurry of green sparks shot out of her wand as she casually incanted the killing curse, and Silviu had made to dive out of the way, though the magic had already fizzled harmlessly not halfway across the room.

"That spell is dangerous," he said, staring incredulously.

"Well, obviously," said Annette.

"And does your… mother know that you're up here?" Silviu asked, when he seemed surer that she was not about to cast any other deadly dark magic his way.

"I'm cleaning," said Annette, holding up the off-white rag in her other hand.

"Surely there are charms for that?" said Silviu.

"I'm a filthy squib," Annette remarked casually, as if having just nearly cast the killing curse was not clear evidence to refute the claim.

"I am perhaps wrong," Silviu began, "but is 'squib' not the word for somebody with no magic?"

"That's right, Mister Vampire," said Annette blithely.

"But then you are clearly no squib," said Silviu.

The last thing Harry saw before the scene dissolved was Annette's honestly perplexed expression. Harry felt himself mirroring it as the mist cleared and he found himself back downstairs in the seedy past version of the White Wyvern.

"Before I go," said Silviu, "What is your full name, so I may write to you?" he asked Annette.

"Annette Yaxley," she said.

"How do you spell it?" asked Silviu.

"Spell?" Annette repeated. "It's a name, not magic."

"I mean, to write it. How do you write it?" Silviu tried, extracting a bit of parchment and a quill from a briefcase that he had laid on a nearby table.

Annette only shrugged. "That's mudblood stuff, writing."

Harry gaped at this obvious misinformation, and Silviu looked equally lost for words.

"So you—you don't write? What about reading?" he finally asked. Annette shook her head. "I can teach you," Silviu said very quickly, and Harry felt he had blurted it out without thinking of the logistics of it, but Annette shook her head, more vehemently this time.

"I can't learn that stuff. I told you, it's mudblood stuff and it will turn me into a mudblood," she said.

"What? That's simply nonsense," said Silviu, but Annette huffed and, rather than continuing the farcical argument, turned around to run away up the stairs, leaving an obviously appalled Silviu staring after her.

Who could have told Annette, of all things, that reading would turn her into a mudblood? And why? Did she still believe it, to this day? Harry could scarcely imagine it, but he remembered that she still claimed to be unable to read, that she had told Nalrod…

Harry remembered suddenly that he would rather like to know why Silviu had killed Nalrod, and what he and Annette had been arguing about earlier, in the land of the living.

But the scene did not change. Harry looked back at Silviu, only to find that the vampire had vanished, and he was standing by himself in the dining room of a disreputable inn of the past. A quick glance told him that in fact, everybody was gone, all the ghostly forms of the ladies, the patrons, the innkeeper—vanished.

"Hello?" Harry called out cautiously, even though he felt a little stupid doing so. He moved forward slowly, and then, feeling suddenly exposed, sprinted across the room and up the stairs. He glimpsed Annette standing at the top, but before he could take the last few steps they disappeared under his feet and he started to fall.

Cold mist swirled around him, but the falling did not end, and no new scene materialised. A little worried now, he tried to think of the workshop and perhaps go back there, or even bring himself out of the pensieve, but was met with no response from his surroundings. The beginnings of panic set in, and his mind flashed to high stone walls.

Gringotts.

It took a moment for the mist to settle, and another for his mind to cease screaming at him enough for Harry to notice that he seemed not to be in a vault, but a small office of some sort, nonetheless featuring unadorned grey walls, and was seated on a chair in front of an unfamiliar goblin. How he had gone from free-fall to a sitting position, he couldn't for the life of him say.

"Mister Vlaicu," said the goblin, whose golden nameplate read "TOSSLINE" in embossed letters, "It has come to our attention that you have been using a personal vault in connection with a business."

Harry looked around wildly for Silviu, saw nobody else, and concluded uncertainly that _he_ must be Silviu, then. But then he was struck by a great sense of familiarity, and an undercurrent of anger. Of course he knew what was going on here.

"That is correct," he said, and it was Silviu's low, slightly accented voice that came out. "I trust that it is no problem? It is within the treaty that any wizard or part-wizard may consider as his personal assets the main source of his income."

"Certainly," the goblin acknowledged, "but each family is also permitted only one non-commercial vault, and it seems your family is scattered and extensive."

"What family, precisely, are you referring to?" Harry asked calmly, though anger was warring with confusion—confusion at what, he was quickly forgetting, but it was there.

A grin bloomed across Tossline's face, and Harry's anger spiked. His hands curled into fists and claws dug into his palms, nearly drawing blood.

"Your company, _vampire_ ," said the goblin.

 _Foregoing pleasantries, is he?_ The thought flashed darkly through Harry's mind.

"Strictly business partners," said Harry without missing a beat.

"A single business," said Tossline. "A single business can hardly claim its constituents as mere partners."

"You and I have a very different idea of what constitutes a business," said Harry.

Vaguely, Harry wondered what exactly it was that he thought "constituted a business," and what business he had even thinking about this sort of thing.

Then the world vanished around him and he was flying through the darkness, bewildered and afraid, and then he saw the tip of a very familiar wand.

With it came a hand, an arm, and then a face. Petri. The workshop. Everything was bathed in the silvery glow of memory. Harry stared at the wand tip as it twirled in familiar circles.

Petri's mouth was moving, he was saying something, he was saying—" _Spiritus, spiritus, spiritus,"_ over and over again, like a mantra, and the wand flicked to the side and Harry gasped as agonising colour and sensation burst over him, and he stumbled backward, falling onto a surprisingly yielding floor that he supposed, vaguely, must have been hit by a cushioning charm. The ceiling spun like a kaleidoscope above him.

"Harry," said Petri, kneeling down beside him and waving his wand in complicated patterns that blurred together. "Very good. You're alive."

Of course he was alive, Harry thought, and then it occurred to him what this sort of declaration might be an indication of.

"You sound surprised," he said crossly. "You mean I could have died?"

"Not could have," said Petri. "You did die, for nearly a minute."

"What?" Harry demanded, still reeling. He took a moment to check that his fingers and toes still worked, relaxing slightly when it appeared that he still had feeling in all his extremities. When his vision stopped swimming, he pushed himself hastily to his feet and was gratified to note that having been apparently temporarily dead had not had any obvious side effects.

Petri did not protest his standing, so Harry decided that it could not have been as bad as it sounded.

"What happened?" he asked.

"You followed the lines of fate too far and lost yourself," said Petri. "It's a common mistake with reconstruction, and the reason why a horcrux is a vital precaution."

The words "common" and "horcrux" clamoured for attention in Harry's head and he vacillated for a moment before asking, "So it's used up? My horcrux?"

"No," said Petri, to Harry's unending relief. "I was able to conjure you back to your body with little issue."

"So it isn't serious?" Harry asked. "Dying?"

Petri laughed. "Of course it is serious. This is the reason why reconstruction is one of the most dangerous practices in necromancy, and we why have taken precautions."

"You didn't tell me this before you—you just made me go in there, you pushed me," Harry said.

Apparently almost dying, or rather, actually dying and then coming back, was not enough justification for taking an accusing tone, because Harry received a stinging hex to the side of his face.

"Do not be impertinent. Would you have gone as far, had you known?" Petri pointed out, "The more memories you reconstruct, the greater the chance of losing yourself in them, but it's wasteful to do the technique without going as far as possible. You are fine, are you not? No numbness?"

Harry scowled, but supposed that he did appear to be fine, aside from the lingering pain from the hex. He shook his head.

"I didn't even find anything useful," he said, just to be contrary, because he was sure it had not been worth dying to see some sundry memories of Silviu. "And I thought you already finished changing Silviu's fate."

"This is not about our vampire friend," said Petri. "That woman, Annette. I want to know who this father of hers was."

"Her father?" Harry repeated. "I definitely didn't find out anything about him."

"We shall see," said Petri, and he walked over to the pensieve and put his face in the bowl. It still looked incredibly uncanny to Harry from the outside.

With his awareness entirely inside the pensieve and his body hanging limply, Petri had put himself in an especially vulnerable position, Harry thought. If he wanted to, he could…

Could what? Harry's mind flashed traitorously to the thought of killing the man, but of course that was ridiculous. What would he do then? Go running to Silviu? The Dursleys?

Harry laughed aloud, somewhat mirthlessly, and put a hand on his forehead. He was clearly still out of sorts from his deadly pensieve adventure. Closing his eyes, Harry let himself melt to the floor and lie in a heap.

He must have fallen asleep, because it felt like no time had passed when a scraping sound, likely the pensieve being moved, reached his ears. His eyes snapped open. Petri had resurfaced and was pushing the pensieve towards the centre of the table.

"Remarkable," he said, turning to gaze thoughtfully at Harry, who scrambled to his feet.

"What?" Harry blurted, unable to hold back the curiosity that had been ready to burst from him all morning. The adventure in the pensieve had only worsened the issue a hundred fold.

"The quality and thoroughness of your reconstruction," Petri elaborated. "They are almost perfect memories."

"Really?" said Harry, not particularly enthused and half-wondering if Petri was being sarcastic.

"Really," said Petri. "I could not have done it better."

"I don't get it," Harry muttered, "I don't even know what I did."

"Describe what you saw, in between memories," said Petri.

"Er, I was here, except in a sort of memory version, and I saw Silviu, and asked him some questions," said Harry.

"Did he respond?" Petri asked, an almost excited edge to his tone.

"Yes," said Harry, wondering whether it was something odd after all. "Last time, with Malfoy, he didn't though."

"I'm not surprised," said Petri. "No; I am surprised that you could connect to Silviu's human spirit."

"How did you know he was human? I mean, he was," said Harry. "Well, then he wasn't."

"After the memory of his turning?" asked Petri. Harry nodded. "You started to shape the representation with your own memories. Before that, you saw his spirit before his death. How did you connect?"

"What do you mean, connect?" Harry asked.

"It's an advanced technique, to think of the dead exactly like the living. It should be difficult even for a master of the mind arts," said Petri.

Harry blinked. It had never occurred to him _not_ to think of the spirits in the pensieve as living, in the sense of being people.

"I just did," he said.

Petri gave him a measured stare, before finally nodding. "It came naturally to you, then? Fine. Regardless, you have done well. Now we know that Annette's father is an enemy." Before Harry could even ask, Petri continued, "There are two ways, or philosophies, to the dark arts—really, to all magic. There is magic as a discipline, and then as an art. I practice in the first way. Most sensible wizards practice in the first way."

Petri was clearly biased on this issue, though it remained to be seen whether it was a justified bias.

"The second way is what you see from Annette in the reconstruction. Notice how she casts spells. The spell is the magic, is her will. There is no question of whether it will work. She would be a very formidable witch were she not nearly a squib," said Petri.

"So the second way is more powerful?" Harry asked, "But then why is it bad?"

"Why is it bad?" Petri repeated, almost mockingly. "Literacy is for mudbloods. Squibs can do magic. Need I continue?"

Harry winced. "Does it make you stupid, or something?"

"It is instinct, intuition," said Petri. "The easiest way to nurture instinct is to neglect reason, rationality. This is how such wizards and witches are trained—no, how they are raised. The 'old way,' they call it, as if being outdated were a virtue."

Harry, who thought that magic still seemed plenty instinctive and irrational, was somewhat bewildered. "How does that help?"

"Your wand," said Petri, summoning Harry's wand from the table—he must have dropped it going into the pensieve the first time—and tossing it to him. Harry snatched it out of the air before it struck him on the nose. "I do not approve of doing this, but it is the easiest way to show you. You remember the Enemy's Curse? _Inimico?_ "

"The one Annette cast?" Harry asked.

"Yes," said Petri. "Cast it at me."

"What?" said Harry. "But how? I don't—" He didn't even know what the spell really did, for one, among a host of other things.

That did not seem to concern Petri, however. "Cast it. The incantation is _inimico_ and the wand movement is a forward jab _._ Point your wand at me and cast it," he said.

Swallowing thickly, Harry raised his wand. Paradoxically, he felt more vulnerable as he aimed at Petri, than he had felt unarmed, despite having been given permission. Not just permission; it had practically been a command. Harry clutched the handle more tightly, the incantation still unwilling to escape his closed mouth.

" _Crucio_ ," said Petri, and Harry flinched automatically, but the curse went wide, splashing harmlessly against the wooden floor some meter to Harry's right.

Still, now reminded most unpleasantly of the sort of person his teacher really was, he said, more confidently than he had expected, " _Inimico!_ " and made a stabbing motion.

A sizzling bolt of bright blue light erupted from the end of his wand, striking some barrier just before it reached Petri, where it contracted into an angry, humming orb balanced on the man's wand tip. With a grunt of obvious effort, Petri directed his wand to the floor, and as it descended it appeared to swallow up the light until the spell was gone.

"How did you do that?" Harry asked, staring at the spot where the light had vanished.

"Nexus charm," said Petri, and Harry gathered that it was something far beyond his level.

"And how did I do that?"

"Many dark arts spells are easy," said Petri, "dangerously easy to cast, but difficult to master. Hurting your enemies, fighting to kill—these are cases where we instinctively reach for magic."

Harry wanted to protest, on principle, but he could not deny that it _had_ been easy. If he could learn something like the mending charm with a tenth of the ease with which that enemy spell, whatever it did, had burst from his wand, he could be a charms master in no time.

As if echoing his thoughts, Petri said, "Imagine if every spell were so easy. You could have anything you wanted with a flick of your wrist. This is a delusion. Such a wizard appears to have powerful magic, but he will be a tool in the hands of cleverer men."

Harry stared, bewildered by the uncharacteristic passion that glinted in the man's dark eyes as he spoke.

"I don't get it," Harry admitted, because the downside of being extremely good at magic was still eluding him. Even if the price to be paid was that one was an idiot of sorts, wasn't being able to do advanced magic itself a real talent?

"Have you ever wondered why wizards need brooms or carpets to fly?" Petri asked. "We aren't so different from muggles and their aeroplanes in that respect."

Harry, surprised that Petri, disdainful of muggles at the best of times, even knew about aeroplanes, shook his head. He hadn't known, anyway, that wizards couldn't fly on their own.

"It is because flight is not a necessity. There are few situations where one needs, overwhelmingly, to fly, over any other option. Flight had to be invented, because people wanted it," Petri said. "Most spells that are in day-to-day use had to be invented. Mending charms, charms to cook, and clean, sorting charms, cosmetic charms—these are all conveniences, not necessities. Only someone who had no idea how to do these things the muggle way, as it were, would consider them magical necessities."

Though thrown at first by the talk of flying, Harry thought he was beginning to follow.

"So being good at magic means—it's a sign that you're bad at, well, everything else?" he asked.

Petri's lip curled into a smirk. "No, not being good at magic, but relying on instinctive magic. It means you are little more than a beast. What sets wizards apart from other creatures? What makes us superior?" He hardly paused, before answering himself, "Creation. We are not bound by our natures. Our magic is tied to no element, our minds and wills are free. We are the perfect union of power and wisdom."

Harry was struck by the strange eloquence of his words, as if they had come out of a prepared speech. He wasn't sure what to say in response.

Petri froze with his hands half-extended in a grand gesture, and put them down, apparently thinking better of it.

"The progress of wizardkind is always made slow by those who would rather be animals. You must not sink to this level," he said. "Do not cast spells that you have not studied."

"Okay," Harry agreed, even if he wasn't so sure that he was convinced. That _inimico_ spell seemed like it would be useful in a pinch. When Annette had cast it in the memory, Silviu had failed to block it, and even Petri had had to use some obscure-sounding countercharm.

Petri accepted his word, and turned away, tidying up the workshop with several flicks of his wand to stack papers on the table. He then began to pull the reconstructed memories from the pensieve one by one and decant them into crystal phials.

Harry frowned. Whatever value Petri had seen in those memories still eluded him.

"You never explained," he said, "how does making Silviu think I'm in his company make things better?"

"That is what he wanted from you, yes?" Petri asked.

"He said he could hide me, and you'd never find me," said Harry. Petri grimaced, which was not reassuring.

"Yes, he could make things very difficult."

"How?" Harry demanded. "Is it sympathetic magic again?"

Petri nodded. "Of course. It is the surest defence against a wizard. Once you have exchanged enough blood with a vampire you will be neither dead nor alive enough for necromancy or scrying to work. And this is why I have made him believe that you are in his company, rather than allowing it to be reality."

"So he thinks he's already done that?" Harry asked. "Exchanged blood?"

"Yes, exactly," said Petri.

A tinkling bell interrupted them. Somebody was at the door upstairs. Petri pocketed his wand and began walking at a leisurely pace. Harry supposed that Rosenkol would let whomever it was inside to wait for them.

"It's our vampire friend," said Petri as he cut himself to exit the blood door. Harry baulked.

"Should I hide?" he asked.

"No. Undoubtedly he is here to see you." said Petri.

"What am I supposed to do?" Harry hissed.

"Act normally," said Petri unhelpfully.

Then they were exiting the trunk, Harry following only reluctantly, and still hoping that Petri was wrong, even though the list of other possible visitors was unhappily short.

Alas, it was indeed Silviu standing at the foot of the stairs, engaged in a staring contest with Rosenkol. At their arrival, the elf shot one last vigorous glare at the vampire before saluting and disapparating.

Silviu nodded at Petri.

"Hello Peters, Harry," he said. "I'm here to apologise."

"And no doubt to recover your wand," said Petri, though without vitriol. Silviu smiled, close-lipped.

"Yes, and that," he agreed. "All the same, I've treated you poorly, as guests in the Alley and as residents. Again, I'm very sorry to have acted so crassly. My only excuse is that I was blinded by past experience."

He glanced between Petri and Harry, and realisation struck Harry like a blow.

"You mean Annette's father?" he asked.

Silviu blinked, clearly surprised. "That's right," he said slowly. "I see now that the situation isn't the same. Harry, I hope you'll accept my apology."

"Fine, if it means you won't kidnap me again," said Harry.

"Of course," Silviu agreed. "Thank you."

"Or use your sympathetic magic—mind control, or whatever, on me," Harry pressed.

Silviu hesitated for a split-second but then nodded again in acquiescence.

There was an awkwardly long silence, and Petri said, "Harry, perhaps you can return our friend's wand to him."

Harry started and scrambled over to his bedside table, where the wand had rolled up against the jar of bluebell flame. He snatched it up and held it out cautiously to Silviu. He still did not trust the vampire at all, but Petri seemed to think it was safe, and he trusted Petri's self-interest.

"Thank you," said Silviu, and put his wand away without incident. "I shall leave you to your day. Goodbye."

He turned on his heel and melted into the shadow of the staircase.

"I don't trust him," said Harry.

Petri laughed. "You say that _now_ ," he murmured. "But he would not lie to his own company."

"How do you figure that?" Harry demanded.

"It would be against his nature," said Petri. "Despite his wand he is not a wizard. His fate is limited by the facts of his existence. You need not worry."

Petri spoke with perfect conviction, but Harry could not bring himself to believe it. It was too simple, and at once too strong of an idea. It reminded him of the virulent energy of the Enemy's Curse that had sprung so easily from his wand, and that he knew would heed his call if he ever were to speak its name again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Dark Magic is easy" is brought to you by Harry casting sectumsempra without even knowing what it did, and succeeding at the imperius curse on the first try, but taking forever to learn schoolwork-related spells.


	21. Invitee

As punishment for his indiscretions, or perhaps just as a matter of expediency, Harry did not get to leave the graveyard until July. Perhaps it would have been longer, had certain events not come to pass, but come they did, quite suddenly and seemingly inevitably.

Despite Silviu's newfound, manufactured belief that Harry was now under his thumb rather than Petri's, and his promise not to use his mind magic against him anymore, Petri had not let up on the matter of resisting compulsions. Thankfully, there was no more casting of the cruciatus curse, and it had become marginally easier to tell which thoughts were his own and which weren't, but Harry had hit a block when it came to resisting banal orders like "tie your shoelaces." He was half-convinced that it was impossible.

In other areas, he had been met with far more success. He could adequately cast the basic six charms series: mending, severing, fire-making, locomotion, animation, and cancellation, along with a handful of other useful charms. There really was a difference between knowing the spell and _knowing the spell_ , even if he couldn't place where that boundary was, exactly, but he felt that he had finally made progress on casting at will.

The thing he was most excited to have begun learning was the warming charm. That was because the warming charm was the base of a variety of spells used in cooking, and he was desperate to eat something that wasn't a potion or boiled vegetables. His last attempt at reinventing the oven using a fire and some rocks had gone poorly, and after cursing him and calling him a muggle Petri had bought him a copy of a popular cooking guide, _Witch's Brew_ by Queenie Goldstein, to avoid any further incidents.

Harry was currently bent over a pile of leaves he had acquired from outside, practising the technique for roasting. The goal was to warm evenly everywhere. So far he had partially burnt several leaves and had not come close to a perfect spread, but he was sure that he was improving. The fantasy of a roast complete with potatoes and Yorkshire pudding played out dreamily in his mind's eye.

It was rudely interrupted by a series of measured knocks. Harry glanced up and debated whether to get the door, but fortunately Petri had already stood from where he was reading at the table to answer it.

Harry wondered who it could be. As far as he knew, Petri had never given anyone his specific address, and salesmen were scarce around graveyards. He supposed it must be Silviu, coming to awkwardly check in on him as he sometimes did.

Petri pushed open the casket lid and froze, looking very much like he would love to shut it again and retreat, but could not. Curious, Harry craned his neck to see the person standing outside. All he could glimpse from his angle was a deep purple robe hem dotted with glittering gold, beneath which protruded the pointed toes of a pair of white boots. It was definitely not Silviu.

"Joachim Petri, what a surprise," said the visitor in German, and Harry gripped his wand more tightly, the name of the Enemy's Curse flashing traitorously in his mind. Whoever it was knew Petri's real identity, despite his charmed appearance.

"Herr Dumbledore," said Petri, after a long pause.

Dumbledore? That name sounded oddly familiar.

"Yes, I'm here to see Mr Potter," said Mr Dumbledore in English. For some reason, Petri winced.

"You might as well come inside," said Petri, and Harry panicked slightly as Petri stepped aside and allowed Mr Dumbledore to pass him down the stairs.

Mr Dumbledore was a very old man who sported a remarkably long, white beard that trailed down below his navel and was, at the moment, haphazardly tucked into his belt. His purple and gold robes were made from a seamless, starry brocade that seemed to change shades subtly at every angle, and resembled the midnight sky. Had he seen Mr Dumbledore walking about on a muggle street, Harry thought he would have mistaken the robe for a fancy dress.

"Where is he?" Mr Dumbledore asked, even though he was looking right at Harry. He almost didn't seem to notice that there was someone there at all.

"He's here," said Petri, looking more nervous than Harry had ever seen him. Mr Dumbledore glanced back at Petri, who averted his gaze.

"Curious," said Mr Dumbledore, looking at Harry again. "And who is this?"

"My apprentice," said Petri.

"Albus Dumbledore," said Mr Dumbledore, bending down and holding out his hand. "I am the Headmaster of Hogwarts."

Incredibly confused and a little wary, Harry quickly put his wand away and reached out to shake Professor Dumbledore's hand.

"Er, I'm Harry," he said. "Nice to meet you."

"A pleasure to meet you as well, my boy," said Professor Dumbledore. His blue eyes twinkled, almost mischievously. "I have a letter here for someone. Perhaps you could ensure that it reaches the right hands."

He withdrew a thick letter from the folds of his robes and Harry took it cautiously. It was held closed by a purple wax seal that had been stamped with what was presumably the Hogwarts crest.

Harry flipped it over. On the back of the parchment envelope was written, in bright green ink:

Mr H. Potter

The South Side of the Casket

66 Knockturn Alley, Plot D-12

London

Greater London

The address was highly alarming. On the one hand, it was clear that the sender knew precisely where he slept, and on the other hand, the way it had been worded made it look like Mr H. Potter was very dead and buried. He didn't know which was worse.

Casting a glance at Professor Dumbledore, who was still watching him expectantly, Harry turned the letter over again and slipped his thumb under the flap, breaking the wax seal and opening the envelope.

He didn't know what he had expected, but it was a letter informing him that he had a place at Hogwarts, and a list of necessary items. Was it customary that the headmaster delivered acceptance letters personally? That seemed unlikely, since a letter usually implied post. Had the _fidelius_ charm interfered with owls?

"Very curious," said Professor Dumbledore.

"What's curious?" Harry could not help asking. His gaze flickered over to Petri, who was standing stiffly to the side, expression blank.

"My boy, forgive me. I consider myself to be gifted with a very good memory, but it seems I have already forgotten your name," said Professor Dumbledore. "Alas, a reminder is perhaps not the remedy here."

He turned to Petri again. "I admit I find myself impressed, Joachim. But perhaps it is not so surprising. I recall you had a particular touch with the _fidelius_."

Petri flinched. "It is one of my specialities," he agreed, carefully.

"All the same, I am terribly curious to understand how Harry Potter disappeared without a trace from the care of his relatives two years ago, only to appear now in the heart of wizarding London," said Professor Dumbledore.

"See for yourself," said Petri, finally looking up. There was some kind of wordless exchange between them, and then Professor Dumbledore slumped slightly, as if a new weight had been added to his shoulders.

"Clever," he said. "All the same, I believe it would best if Harry returned to his relatives until it comes time for him to attend Hogwarts."

The Dursleys? Harry made a face, just as Petri said, "His muggle relatives? Surely you jest."

"He is not like you, Joachim," said Professor Dumbledore.

"Of course not," said Petri. "That is irrelevant."

"Magic does not make worth," Professor Dumbledore said, his eyes losing their twinkle. It felt like a reprimand, but Harry didn't understand what he meant. He noticed that Petri's hand twitched towards his wand pocket.

There was a pause, and then Professor Dumbledore said, "I see we are at an impasse." He suddenly drew his wand, and every hair on Harry's body stood on end. Petri, if anything, seemed even more affected, for he immediately fixed his gaze upon the wand and looked ready to take a step back or turn and apparate away at a moment's notice.

"This is hardly your style," Petri said. Professor Dumbledore angled his wand to point down towards the floor, his eyes twinkling again.

"You misunderstand, Joachim," he said. "Harry is very important to the future of the wizarding world, more important than you could know. I simply require your word. I hope you would agree that that is more, _my style_ , as you say."

Petri gave a jerky nod.

"Protect Harry, even from yourself," said Professor Dumbledore. "Do this for _him,_ if not me. Do I have your word?"

Petri was still staring at Professor Dumbledore's wand. It was a peculiar wand, Harry thought, very long and not smooth like the others he had seen, but bulging at intervals with what seemed to be carvings of berries.

"You have it," said Petri, at length. "Don't you think that I don't know what you're doing."

"I wouldn't dare imagine that you didn't, my boy," said Professor Dumbledore. Harry thought, rather inappropriately, that it was a little funny to hear Petri, old as he was, be called "boy," and had to hold back a giggle. Petri grimaced.

"But I see that I've overstayed my welcome. I shall see you at Hogwarts, Harry," Professor Dumbledore added, with a brief glance back. Harry watched him ascend the stairs in bewilderment. Hadn't he claimed to have forgotten Harry's name?

The casket door slammed shut, and Petri collapsed onto a chair. Harry didn't think he'd ever seen the man look so out of sorts, and was almost concerned.

"Who was that?" he asked. "Did he just threaten you—us?"

"That," said Petri, "was Albus Dumbledore, the Supreme Mugwump and the most powerful wizard in the world. His very presence is threat enough."

"What's Supreme Mugwump mean?" Harry asked, trying not to snort at the strange title, given the seriousness of the context.

"The head of the International Confederation of Wizards," said Petri. Harry nodded. That sounded very important indeed. Someone like that was the headmaster of Hogwarts?

Then he remembered something else. "How did he see through the _fidelius_ charm? I thought that was impossible! And why did he want me to go back to the Dursleys, I mean, my relatives?"

"He did not see through the _fidelius_ as much as around it," said Petri. "Rest assured, he still has no way of knowing that you are Harry Potter, as little as it matters. As for the muggles, I do not know. He's a muggle-lover, but that cannot be the only reason."

"Oh. Couldn't someone else do the same thing with the _fidelius_?" Harry asked. Petri shook his head.

"I doubt it. Dumbledore is an almost unparalleled genius," he said.

"How do you know him?" Harry asked.

"About fifty years ago, there was a war on the Continent," Petri said. Harry nodded, thinking of the Second World War and wondering if wizards had been involved in that. "Dumbledore ended it, nearly single-handedly. Afterwards he spoke for me, saved me from prison, even though we were enemies. Perhaps he pitied me; I do not know his reasoning."

Harry privately thought that Dumbledore had made the wrong choice, seeing as Petri had obviously done all kinds of illegal things since then, and probably deserved to be in prison.

"Oh," he said instead. He frowned, and then asked, "But wait, he came to see _me_. Why? He said I was important, but I don't understand how."

"I don't know," Petri said sharply, "but it may have something to do with your defeat of the Dark Lord."

"Maybe he thinks it means I'm good at magic," Harry suggested. Petri snorted; humour seemed to revive him somewhat.

"You're above average for your age," he allowed. "But I doubt you could manage the Dark Lord again, if you can't manage me."

Harry made a face and opened his mouth to say something that would probably be stupid enough to earn him a stinging hex, but then he remembered that he was still holding his Hogwarts letter and changed course.

"Am I going to Hogwarts, then? Not Durmstrang?"

"Yes, so it seems," said Petri, his face rather pinched. "Dumbledore did appear to be under that impression."

He took a glance at the supply list. "I don't have half these things," he said.

"We can go to Diagon Alley later," said Petri, sighing deeply. "When does term start?"

Harry looked over his letter. "Term begins on September 1," he read, "We await your owl by no later than July 31, wait, do we need to owl the school?"

"I would imagine not, since the headmaster himself came to see you," said Petri. Harry wasn't convinced.

"But what if they don't let me go because of something stupid like that?" he said. "I'll send a letter. Wait, what do I write? Just 'I accept?'"

Petri sighed. "You may waste parchment when you get your own."

"I'll write it on the back of this," Harry said stubbornly, flipping over his acceptance letter. Petri did not stop him when he walked over to the table to grab one of the self-inking quills lying there.

Harry found himself very excited to be going to Hogwarts. He had got used to Petri, and there was no way he wanted to go back to the likes of the Dursleys, but that didn't meant he wanted to spend every waking moment in the dark wizard's presence or else trapped inside a piece of luggage. At Hogwarts, without Dudley around, maybe he could even make some friends.

On the morning of Harry's birthday, they received an owl from Professor Dumbledore with the key to Harry's vault enclosed. It was entirely news to Harry that he had such a vault, but he supposed it made sense that his parents hadn't left him with nothing, given that his father at least had been a pureblood wizard from a relatively old family. Why Professor Dumbledore had the key was not explained, but Harry acknowledged the wisdom of keeping such a thing out of the hands of the Dursleys. Even if they couldn't have taken the money for themselves, he had no doubt that they would have conveniently "forgotten" to tell him about it.

"You'd best not go near Gringotts," Petri said, and went to retrieve Harry's money alone. Harry was fairly certain, after contemplating the matter at length, that even Gornuk Turnlink would not be able to recognise him, but he still had nightmares sometimes about being trapped and was in no hurry to go back into the tunnels. He was stuck in the trunk instead, but at least he knew he could get out.

There was no need to go, anyway, even if he didn't trust Petri. Harry had kept Nalrod's ledger as a memento and a reminder, but he was not above using it for its intended purpose. It was enchanted in a way that Petri had been entirely unable to decipher, but it was obvious how it worked. It showed the amount of money in all the vaults Nalrod had been in charge of. Harry had only needed to press his key to the key-shaped indent in the cover to get his own vault added to the book.

He had the rather mind-blowing sum of 51,246 galleons in his vault, though as he watched the number revised itself down a hundred, presumably due to Petri's withdrawal. The total was enough to purchase a nice flat in Carkitt Market, according to Petri, though he would be very broke afterwards and probably could not afford to pay the property tax. Harry didn't care about that. The point was that he was rich!

It didn't bother him that Petri insisted he spend his own money, because it meant he could buy his things new instead of second-hand like Petri most definitely would have wanted. After nine years suffering the sight of Dudley being spoiled rotten while Harry got nothing but scraps, he wanted to indulge himself for a change. Not to that extent, of course—he had no desire to become a pig in a wig—just a little.

He knew how much money was in Petri's vault, too, since it had been one of Nalrod's. Petri was also rich, but to Harry's astonishment, he had less than Harry did. His vault contained just short of forty thousand galleons. Harry wondered where his parents had got so much money, especially given that they had died very young. Perhaps the money was from his grandparents' generation.

The trunk lid opened with a click and a hiss, and Petri's stern face peered inside. The ladder unfolded itself and Harry scrambled up to the surface. Petri handed him a jingling bag of coins.

"Thanks," said Harry. "A hundred galleons, right?"

"Yes," said Petri, looking askance at the ledger tucked under Harry's arm. "That should be more than enough for your school things."

They flooed into the Leaky Cauldron, as usual. An old, short wizard in a top hat sat at the table immediately by the fireplace, and Harry instinctively ducked his head to avoid being seen, even though he knew he couldn't be recognised. He was sure that this same wizard had bowed to him in a muggle shop once. Were English wizards really so obsessed with Harry Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived?

They really were, as he was soon to find out.

Petri took Harry to Flourish and Blotts first, probably since he was also interested in buying a book or two. All the set books for Hogwarts were up front, as it was the season for school shopping, so Harry picked out the ones he needed within a minute. Petri already had the _Standard Book of Spells_ in every grade, _Magical Theory_ , _Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,_ and the self-updating edition of _A History of Magic_ , so Harry did not need to get those. The _Standard Book_ was a little old, and an edition behind, but Petri assured him that there would be little substantive difference and Harry already knew most of the spells in the first book, anyway.

While he waited for Petri, who was browsing the Divination section, Harry glanced at the fiction shelves and had to do a double take—his name was everywhere! From _Harry Potter and the Dragon Rider_ to _The Adventures of Harry Potter, Boy Auror_ , there was an entire shelf dedicated to what appeared to be stories about him. He was flabbergasted and had to pull one from the shelf and take a look.

"Harry waved his wand and summoned a wall of fire, stalling the dragon as its iron suit melted in the heat. 'Only a fool would armour a dragon!' he cried victoriously. He looked back to his sidekick, Rupert. 'Rupert, take the lady and run. I'll hold him off!' he ordered. Rupert climbed onto the magic carpet..." Harry scowled, finding it disturbing to see himself depicted as some kind of fantasy hero. "It's not even good," he muttered, closing the book and slipping it back into its place.

"There you are." It was Petri. He glanced at the shelf Harry had been staring at and sneered. "Plenty of wizards try to profit from others' achievements."

"They're not even good," Harry complained.

"You'd best hope they never get better," said Petri, and Harry supposed he had a point. He paid twenty-one galleons for the rather pricey textbooks— _The Dark Forces: A Guide to Self-Protection_ had been a whopping seven galleons—and they left. Petri did not buy anything in the end.

As they exited, they passed right by Lucius Malfoy, who was entering the shop. The man paid them no mind, not even to sneer. Harry stiffened despite himself.

They headed next door to Madam Malkin's. Harry had just about outgrown his current robes, to the point where his ankles showed even when he stood still, so it was perfect timing for new ones.

When they arrived, a very familiar blond boy was already being fitted in the back. Harry took one look at him and almost turned around to leave, but Petri was blocking the door so he couldn't without making a scene.

"Hogwarts, dear?" asked Madam Malkin, and Harry nodded. "Oh, Mr. Peters. Is this your son?"

"My nephew," said Petri. He leaned down and whispered in Harry's ear, "Play nicely." As if Harry needed to hear that. More loudly, he said, "I'll be across the street to fetch your potions kit. Stay here."

And to make sure of it, Petri took Harry's money with him. Harry let him, because he honestly did not trust himself not to get into some kind of trouble.

Madam Malkin ushered Harry onto a stool right next to Lucius Malfoy's son. The other boy glanced over to Harry curiously, earning a reprimand from the witch fitting him, which he entirely ignored.

"Hello. Hogwarts too?" asked the boy, who evidently did not recognise Harry at all even if the converse was not true.

"Yes," said Harry, not daring to nod now that he was draped in pinned fabric.

"Father's next door buying my books and Mother's up the street looking at wands," said the young Malfoy. Harry could not remember if he had sounded this spoilt the last time they had met, but he was definitely verging on Dudley's level. The boy started to go on about how he was going to smuggle a broom into Hogwarts despite the first year ban, a broom he apparently did not even yet have.

"I saw your father at Flourish and Blotts," Harry said, just to get him to shut up. "Malfoy, right?"

He bit back a grimace as the boy practically preened. "That's right. Heard of us have you? I'm Draco Malfoy. What's your surname?"

"Potter," said Harry, without thinking.

"Potter, like Harry Potter?"

"Yes, like that," said Harry, feeling suddenly confident. It was a far cry from the last time Harry had told Draco Malfoy his name. There was not much reaction at all, and Malfoy only nodded absently. Despite himself, Harry was a little amused at his strange anonymity.

"So, do you know what house you'll be sorted in?" Malfoy asked.

"No," said Harry, wincing as he was stuck with a pin.

"Sorry, dear," said Madam Malkin.

"It's fine. How do they decide?" Harry asked.

"I'm not sure. It's a secret," Malfoy admitted, "but all the same I know I'll be in Slytherin. That's where my family's been for generations. Imagine being in Hufflepuff, I think I'd leave, wouldn't you?"

"You wouldn't really leave?" Harry asked, sceptical. He didn't know anything about the Hogwarts houses, but he couldn't imagine that any of them was really worse than the others. "What would you do instead?"

"Well, Father's mentioned sending me to Durmstrang, but Mother doesn't want me to go there, says it's too far," said Malfoy. "But _Hufflepuff_."

Harry was pleased that they had turned to the topic of Durmstrang, about which he was ironically more knowledgeable than about Hogwarts. Petri had gone to Durmstrang himself, and he told stories on occasion.

"It is far," Harry said. "It's up north on the Continent, on top of a mountain, somewhere really cold."

Malfoy made a face, and Harry gathered he didn't much like the cold. "Father says they don't accept riff-raff there, not like Hogwarts. Hogwarts takes all sorts. Can you imagine, some of them have never even heard of it until they get their letters?"

Harry guessed that Malfoy was talking about mudbloods, but even Harry knew better now than to say the word in public. They were called muggle-borns here. There hadn't been any muggle-borns to speak of in Germany, as far as Harry had known, but they were a third of the population in Britain. Petri complained about it all the time, almost as much as Uncle Vernon used to (and probably still did) complain about foreigners.

Harry frowned a little. He knew what it was like to grow up knowing nothing about magic. It had hardly been his fault, and it was the same for muggle-borns. He was about to say as much to Malfoy when the witch pinning the blond boy's robes said, "You're all done," and let him step down from the stool.

"I suppose I'll see you at Hogwarts," said Malfoy, and allowed himself to be led to the front of the shop. Harry was not sorry to see him go.

Petri came in several minutes later, thankfully after Lucius Malfoy had already stopped by to collect his son. Harry took his money and paid for his new robes and shirts, and a set of black and grey striped ties which would change to the right colour once he was sorted, if he put his wand to them and said the name of his house. He deposited everything inside the cauldron Petri was carrying like a shopping basket.

"What is left?" Petri asked.

"Scales and telescope," said Harry.

"We will have to go to Wiseacre's. Do not forget, you need parchment too," said Petri.

"Ooh," Harry said, admiring a gaudy green quill in the window of Amanuensis Quills.

"You would look ridiculous writing with that," said Petri. Harry scowled, even though he privately agreed. The pinions had not been stripped much either, so he suspected it was more decorative than intended for actual use.

They stopped by Scribbulus Writing Instruments instead, which sold a much more sensible array of quills, though it had a wider variety of inks, including a colour-change ink that flashed a different bright shade every few seconds. Harry picked up a bottle of regular black ink, two seven-yard scrolls of parchment, a twenty-nine pack of loose sheets, and a dozen cheap goose quills. If he asked nicely, Petri might enchant them to self-ink. At any rate, the self-inking quills in the shop cost as much as all the ones he bought combined, so he decided against them.

They went to Wiseacre's to pick up a collapsible brass telescope and a set of scales, as well as a basic trunk, and used the shop's floo to return home directly.

"Can you make these self-inking?" Harry asked Petri, taking out his new quills.

"Can _you_ make them self-inking?" Petri asked him in return. Harry frowned at the impromptu assignment. It was his birthday.

Knowing that an appeal from sentiment was unlikely to work, Harry resigned himself to considering the problem.

"The quill has to get the ink from the bottle, but not all the time or it'll overflow," he said. "It should only ink itself when you've run out. No, why? It should just stay fully inked and replenish itself whenever you use some. A switching spell to switch old and new ink?"

"That could work," Petri said, and Harry got the impression that it in fact could not work at all, "but it would be very inefficient. Can you tell me why?"

"Well it would switch every second or so even when you're not using it. That's too much," said Harry. "So put a conditional charm on if the tip is pressing on something. I can't do that, though." Not that he could cast a switching spell, either.

"Suppose you could. It's a theoretical exercise," said Petri.

"Okay, so a conditional charm. Switch every time there's pressure. Is that it?" Harry asked.

"A good attempt," said Petri, picking up one of Harry's new quills, "but such an advanced switching spell is beyond all but masters of transfiguration. There is also the question of what you would do if the ink runs out."

"Can't you refill it?" Harry asked. He'd seen Petri cast the spell on a glass of water before, in lieu of using the water-making spell again.

"I could," said Petri.

"Why does anybody buy ink?" Harry asked.

"Convenience," said Petri, "and of course the quality degrades if you refill it. A good-quality refill is more trouble than it's worth. Then there is magical or metal-based ink, which you cannot duplicate."

Harry supposed that that was why Petri never duplicated their food. Still, he was curious. "But it's possible to make a good refill? How?"

Petri sighed. "I have a book on this, somewhere. Forget about the refill for now. How will you bring the ink to your quill? And keep in mind that whatever you do must persist after sharpening."

Harry thought about it a bit more and then sighed in frustration. "I don't know," he said. "The switching spell was my only guess."

"The quills at the shop are most likely specially designed," Petri said. "It is a quill shop, not an enchanter's shop. There is a tube in the shaft that holds ink, and they cast the refilling charm on the tube."

"So it's a fountain pen?" Harry demanded, feeling a little cheated.

"More or less," Petri agreed, "But there is a way to charm a regular quill."

He was not forthcoming with the solution, so Harry was forced to think some more. A little hesitantly, he asked, "How does that blood-drawing spell you use work?"

"Good. That's a variant of the siphoning charm," Petri said, smiling. "You could use it to draw the ink into the quill. A good solution. But in fact you do not need to siphon the ink anywhere. You only need a linking charm, which you will learn much later."

Petri performed the enchantment then. It was a long string of wand movements and a chant that verged on a tongue twister. He used the quill to write the enchantment for Harry.

"First we set the linking charm between the quill and the inkwell. The charm does not care whether there's any ink. Set the conditional charm on pressure, along the shaft and not only the tip, and relative movement between ends. This is important so that the quill does not bleed ink everywhere. End with the nullity charm. Simple," said Petri.

Given that Harry could not cast any of the spells involved, other than the nullity charm, he would hardly consider it simple, but was glad for the functioning quill. Petri quickly repeated the enchantment on several of the others Harry had bought as well.

"That should suffice," he said.

"Thanks," said Harry.

He packed all his equipment in his new trunk, which also had an extension charm on it but only a modest one that doubled the depth and width, and they ventured into Petri's library to retrieve the schoolbooks he hadn't bought, so as to have them all in one place.

Petri summoned them all by their titles, along with _Duplication for Two_ , by Ambrose Dagworth, which was about how to duplicate things effectively. They took the books out of the trunk and Harry sat down on his bed to read the duplication book.

On the first page, unsurprisingly, were the instructions for the duplication charm. The incantation was _geminio,_ and the book warned that any simple duplicate was of inferior quality and would fade after a time. What "inferior quality" meant apparently depended on the original item, but the only thing that could be reliably duplicated was quartz, and it still wasn't permanent.

Harry tried to duplicate one of his practice leaves and ended up with a very sad, very withered copy that seemed to evaporate when he tried to touch it. He put away his wand in favour of reading a bit more.

Essentially permanent, quality-preserving duplication was possible, as Petri had suggested, but it was a type of alchemy, which was beyond anything taught at wizarding schools. It involved infusing the property of quartz into the item in question using a very complicated-looking transfiguration, duplicating the object as usual, and then submerging it into an even more complicated-looking potion. And of course, this process only worked on non-enchanted items, and there was an extra factor to be added for every kind of material in the item.

Harry saw what Petri meant when he said that it was more effort than it was worth, but the idea was still interesting. The author suggested that once someone had mastered this method, they could then go on to duplicate valuable items or circumvent the "Principle Exceptions to Gamp's Law," whatever that was, and make an infinite food or gold supply.

Infinite food did sound rather good to Harry, but he wasn't sure he really wanted to eat food that "had the property of quartz" and had been dipped into a potion full of strange ingredients.

"Do you know alchemy?" Harry asked Petri later, wondering why he had this book at all.

"No," said Petri. "I have only basic transfiguration and potions skill. I am sure plenty of wizards own that book, even though the vast majority do not practise alchemy at all. Almost everyone fantasizes about effective duplication. As much as you wanted or needed of anything? No more scarcity. It would be a utopia. Unfortunately, alchemy is the very opposite of easy."

Harry nodded, looking regretfully at the book. Petri was right. He wanted the powers described in that book, could imagine them and what he would do with them, but it seemed hopelessly difficult compared even to other desirable spells that were currently far out of his reach. Maybe after Hogwarts, probably after his apprenticeship ended, he could go back to the topic.

"But does that mean nobody can do this?" he asked. "If even just one person could, wouldn't there still be no more scarcity?"

"There are people who can," Petri said. "Albus Dumbledore, for example, and his old alchemy master, Nicolas Flamel. But it still isn't so efficient. They could make everything they need, but not everything everyone else needs."

Harry set the book aside and lay down on his bed. Magic could do amazing things, but it still wasn't enough to solve people's problems. Maybe a wizard like Albus Dumbledore could do everything for himself, using just magic, but most witches and wizards Harry had seen weren't very good at more than one or two kinds of magic. He thought it was a bit of a waste.

Harry only knew anything about charms, and maybe a little about conjuration and divination, but only the kind that was dark magic and not really useful. That was why there had to be a place like Hogwarts, he concluded. Hogwarts had some of everything. Harry smiled to himself.

He couldn't wait.


	22. Newcomer

Before he knew it, it was September the first, and Harry was stumbling out of the floo with his heavy trunk throwing him off balance. Petri came out right after him and ushered him out of the way as the fire flared green again.

Harry was staring, mouth agape, at the shining, scarlet steam engine perched on the narrow tracks. That wasn't what he had expected at all. An embossed metal sign board hanging from the ceiling read: Platform 9 ¾.

The platform was packed with students and their families, and was a cacophonous mess. Owls of all shapes and sizes screeched over the dull roar of human voices. Small children, too young for Hogwarts, ran amok through the sea of adults, screaming. Harry saw several parents crying and squeezing their reluctant and embarrassed children. Harry was a little glad, then, that he just had Petri, who couldn't care less.

"One last thing before you leave," said Petri. "If you see the headmaster, try to avoid looking into his eyes. He can see your thoughts and even your memories."

"You mean he can read minds?" Harry demanded.

"Not exactly, but you can think of it like that," said Petri. "It's very hard to stop, so the best would be not to make eye contact," said Petri. He glanced up at the large golden clock that hovered above the train. "You should board. The train leaves in ten minutes."

"Right," said Harry, still reeling with the revelation of possible mind reading. No eye contact. Now he was reluctant to make eye contact with anybody, just in time to make first impressions. "Er, bye, I suppose. I'll see you at Christmas."

"Don't forget to practise," said Petri.

Harry scowled, dragging his trunk along behind him. Petri had given him a journal full of enchanting exercises. He hadn't set a deadline, and had warned that they might be beyond his level, but Harry knew he would feel like an idiot if he didn't manage to complete at least some of them before the term was up.

He had also told Harry to continue practising to improve his reanimation spell. He was eager to try, but not so sure where he was supposed to get perfectly preserved animal corpses. He certainly wasn't about to cast the killing curse.

Recalling that he was a wizard, Harry dropped his trunk and pointed his wand at it, casting the locomotion charm and directing it to move ahead of him. At the train door, he gave his wand a swish and flick and his trunk rose a foot and cleared the edge of gap. Magic was brilliant. He spied other first years, and even older students, struggling with their trunks, and grinned to himself.

He wondered if he might be ahead. The thought was a novel, exciting one. He'd never truly been ahead academically in his life. Earning better marks than Dudley had resulted in yelling from Aunt Petunia and a stint in the cupboard with no meals, and Dudley had not exactly been the paragon of excellence. Harry had stopped trying soon enough, and even his lazy, half-finished work struggled to perform worse than Dudley's best (though Harry suspected Dudley had never tried, either).

There were no Dursleys here to stop him from doing his best now, and anyway, didn't he want to learn all kinds of magic? If he did, he would have to pay attention in lessons and even revise, something he'd never done before, but did theoretically know how to do.

Harry searched for somewhere to sit. Despite there being fewer than ten minutes until departure, the corridor was nearly deserted, and the shaded compartment windows showed singular murky figures within as he peered through them. Everybody was still out on the platform, saying their last goodbyes. Harry found an empty compartment towards the back of the train car he had entered, and tugged on the handle. The door slid open with a rattle and thud. Stepping inside, he closed it more carefully behind him. There was space for six inside, perhaps more. The leather-upholstered seats had no dividers or armrests.

He levitated his trunk up to the luggage rack and sat down in the corner with a sigh. Looking out the window provided some distraction, but it was difficult to pick out much in the chaos of the platform. Petri was long gone, of course. Harry leapt to his feet and and rummaged around in his trunk for something to read. After some indecision, he selected _One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi_ , figuring that he should at least look into the subjects he was unfamiliar with.

Unfortunately, the book was less of a textbook than a reference. It reminded him of the _Complete Compendium of Charms_ , only for Herbology. He wasn't sure if reading about magical plants in alphabetical order was the most efficient way of learning about them. All the same, he was too lazy to go through his trunk again, so he resigned himself to reading about aconite.

He had hardly got through the first sentence and discovered that it was also called monkshood and wolfsbane when the door to the compartment burst open and a girl with a massive mane of bushy brown hair poked her head inside. She was dressed smartly in a button-up blouse and knee-length grey skirt, but no robes.

"Oh, sorry," she said, "I thought it was empty. Wait, are you a first year? I am too. That's our Herbology reference. It's ever so interesting, isn't it? I think it's all so interesting! I've learned all our books by heart, of course. I hope it will be enough. Nobody in my family's magic, so I didn't know about any of this until Professor McGonagall came to show us. What about you?"

She said all this in a single breath. Harry stared over the edge of his forgotten book as she came inside without so much as asking, dragging her trunk behind her with some difficulty and closing the shuddering door behind her with her foot. She glanced with some trepidation between the trunk and the overhead rack.

"Let me help," Harry said, deciding to address the immediate problem first. " _Wingardium Leviosa_ ," he murmured, swishing and flicking in his wand in a by now reflexive motion. The trunk rose up in the air and set itself down gently on the rack.

"Wow, that's the levitation charm," said the excitable girl rather redundantly as she took a seat across from him. Harry fought the urge to frown. "I've tried a few spells, and they've all worked for me, but I haven't tried that one yet. Are your parents wizards?"

"My parents are dead," he said, with a little guilty pleasure, as she instantly deflated and started to stammer an apology. "But yes, they were a witch and wizard."

There was an awkward silence, which Harry regretted. He finally managed, "So, er, what's your name? I'm Harry Potter." It was exceedingly odd to say it, because he could see how his name slipped right past the girl's awareness, her eyes glazing over for a fraction of a second. He hoped she remembered at least part of it.

"Oh!" She flushed. "Right. I'm Hermione Granger. My parents are dentists."

She didn't seem to know what to say next. Harry floundered for something a reply less awkward than, "That's nice." He thought over the other things she had said.

"Did you really learn all our course books by heart?" he asked.

"Not _exactly_ , but close," she said, turning pink. "I've read them all a dozen times."

Harry couldn't imagine why anyone would read a book front to back more than once. Wasn't the point of references that they were supposed to be consulted as needed? Still, intrigued and a little incredulous, he opened his book to a random page.

"What's murtlap, then?" he asked.

"A murtlap is a sea creature that favours cool, shallow waters, and is commonly found on the coasts of Britain. Under that there's a drawing of one, looks a bit like a rat with an anemone on its back. The tentacles on a murtlap's back are poisonous when fresh, but safe to eat after pickling with vinegar. Pickled murtlap tentacles, when consumed, increase jinx resistance, though too much will result in the growth of purple ear hair. Soaking—"

"Wow," Harry said, cutting her off when it became apparent that she wasn't going to stop on her own until she finished the entry. "That's practically word for word." He was impressed, despite himself. Even holding a remembrall to keep him on track, he could only recall perhaps half the information in a book, and would certainly not be able to recite passages on command.

He was about to tell her so, but just then, there was a loud whistle from outside, no doubt to warn stragglers to board, and immediately thereafter came a knock on the compartment door. Harry and Hermione looked at each other but neither stood up. The door opened a crack, and a boy with a chubby face peered in.

"O-oh, I'm sorry," he stammered. There was sweat beading on his brow. "I'll just..."

"Come in," Harry said. He patted the seat next to him. "You can sit with us." He glanced briefly at Hermione, but she didn't seem to have any objection.

The boy pushed the door open completely and revealed that he had a large toad clutched to his chest. Harry could not fathom why anybody would want a toad for a pet, but he tried not to let it show in his face and instead turned to help with the trunk. The boy, obviously a first year like them, judging from his grey tie, looked very intimidated when Harry took out his wand and cast the levitation charm.

"I'm Harry," said Harry, holding out a hand.

"N-Neville Longbottom," said the boy, shaking Harry's hand limply. Harry bit back a grimace at the slimy feeling that he hoped was just sweat and not toad juice. He surreptitiously wiped his hand on his robes.

Hermione introduced herself to Neville, and the boy sat down next to Harry, setting his toad on the empty seat by the door. It croaked and its body pulsated revoltingly. Harry looked away.

The train shuddered and then began to move, and he looked out the window to watch the receding faces of the crowd. They travelled through a stretch of tunnel before they emerged into an open field that definitely did not look as if it belonged in the middle of London. Harry quickly lost interest in the countryside and turned away.

He noticed Neville was eyeing his book like he wanted to say something, and asked "Do you know much about herbology?"

"I love plants," said Neville. "Gran's got greenhouses at home, and I have my own section that I tend. I'll miss it, but, Hogwarts, right?" He looked down immediately after he finished speaking, as if horrified that he'd said so much.

"Right," said Harry. "So you live with your grandmother?"

It was his turn to feel insensitive as Neville shrank down even further and nodded wordlessly. Obviously something had happened to Neville's parents as well.

He tried to change the subject. "So er, do you know what house you want to be in?" He glanced at Hermione as well. Harry had picked up _Hogwarts, a History_ from Flourish and Blotts after he realised that he was almost completely ignorant about the school. The book turned out not to be all that interesting but he had got far enough to learn about the houses.

"Gran wants me to be in Gryffindor, like my parents were," said Neville, looking miserable, "but I'll probably end up in Hufflepuff."

"Nothing wrong with Hufflepuff," Harry said quickly, just to spite Draco Malfoy in his head. Perhaps he had a biased opinion of Malfoy because of his slimy father, but the boy had not exactly made a great impression at the robe shop where they'd last met.

Still, Neville didn't seem to believe him either, judging by his slightly green face.

"There are plenty of famous wizards from Hufflepuff," Hermione said. Harry noticed she didn't give any examples. "Although I'd like to be in Gryffindor as well. It seems the best by far. I hear Dumbledore himself was in it. Ravenclaw wouldn't be so bad either."

Hermione turned her gaze expectantly on Harry, and Neville peeked at him beneath his fringe.

"Oh, er, I haven't thought about it much," he said. That was a lie. He had thought about it rather a lot and tried to match himself with the house characteristics, but had failed to come up with anything definitive. "Gryffindor seems good," he said, since that seemed to be Hermione's and Neville's house of choice. He wasn't sure he wanted to be in the same house as them—Hermione was a bit overbearing and Neville too meek—but it wouldn't be intolerable. "But I wouldn't mind any of the other houses, either."

"Gran would disown me if I made Slytherin," Neville said gloomily.

"Because it's the house You-Know-Who was in?" Hermione asked.

"And the Death Eaters," Neville added, just as Harry was about to ask who "You-Know-Who" was supposed to be.

The Dark Lord; right. Why had Hermione picked this moment to bring _that_ up?

"That doesn't mean Slytherin's all bad, though," Harry said, trying for a more optimistic angle. "It's just a house."

Neville looked a bit peaky at the suggestion, however, so Harry didn't press the topic.

"There are more dark wizards from Slytherin than any other house," Hermione said. Harry frowned at her, though she hardly seemed notice it. He tried to think of some other topic for discussion.

Still, he could not help wondering if he was a dark wizard, and whether that meant he was destined for Slytherin, too, and whether everybody thought like Neville and Hermione. Well, clearly not everybody, given Draco Malfoy, but he was sort of a git.

Harry's eyes landed on Neville's toad, and he said, "Er, Neville, nice toad." He cringed a little at how awkward he sounded. Neville seemed to brighten up at his interest, however.

"Oh, this is Trevor. He was a gift from my Uncle Algie, for doing my first accidental magic," Neville said. His face screwed up a little, then. "Before that, they were afraid I was a squib."

The way he said it, it was obvious that in his mind, being a squib was Very Bad.

"Oh," said Harry, wondering how every topic he managed to bring up seemed to be a bad one. "Er, well, you're going to Hogwarts, so you probably have lots of magic." Harry was fairly certain that it was true, anyway. According to _Hogwarts, a History_ , Hogwarts only accepted fairly powerful witches and wizards, unlike Durmstrang, which accepted students based on blood status, or Beauxbatons, which valued special talents. This was one of the reasons why Hogwarts was supposedly the best European school.

"Right," said Neville, smiling weakly.

Harry half expected Hermione to bring up the information from _Hogwarts, a History_ , which she must have read, as corroboration, but instead, she said, "What was your first accidental magic? I did a few things, like getting books off tall shelves and such, but at the time I thought I was just imagining things." She turned a little pink at that.

"I fell out of the window," said Neville, and Harry and Hermione stared a little. "But I bounced! Gran was so pleased. We celebrated with cake. And the next day, my Uncle Algie gave me Trevor!"

This appeared to be a good memory for Neville, so Harry didn't say anything. When Hermione looked like she was ready to protest, he said quickly, "The first time I remember, I turned my teacher's wig blue. I got in trouble for it, even though there was no way I could have done it, that anyone knew of."

"You live with muggles?" Hermione asked astutely.

"Yes, my aunt and uncle," said Harry. "But I don't live with them anymore."

"Oh," said Hermione, but she didn't ask why. Maybe she was afraid that they had died, too. Harry's thoughts briefly wandered to the Dursleys, and how they might be doing without him. Were they happier, or had they not even noticed that he was gone?

Neville, having missed the part of the conversation about Harry's parents, asked, "Where do you live now?"

"Er, with another uncle," said Harry, not entirely sure if that was the story he was meant to go with. He supposed he might as well go all the way, and added, "He's a half vampire."

Neville's eyes got very round. "Half v-vampire?" he stammered. "Are you..." He flushed, trailing off.

"Oh, er," Harry said, wondering what to say. His first instinct was to deny it, because of course he wasn't, but then there was the matter of his recently acquired allergy to garlic and roses. It might be easier to pass that off as something inherited, rather than explain how he had been attacked by a vampire, who was also his landlord, so he said, "Only a little, don't worry."

"Are you really part vampire?" Hermione asked. "Are you sensitive to sunlight, then? Or garlic?"

"Well not sunlight," said Harry. "I can't do any vampire magic anyway. But I am allergic to garlic."

"Fascinating," said Hermione, though Harry could not see how it was. Neville seemed to agree with him, because he looked rather peaky.

"So, do muggles know about vampires?" Neville asked Hermione.

"Well, they have myths," she said, "and I think they're fairly accurate. Most muggles don't believe they exist, of course. There's myths about witches too, but those are a bit off. They're usually described as warty and evil."

"Sounds like a hag," Harry noted. Neville shuddered.

"That's what I thought too, when I read about hags," said Hermione. "Do they really eat children? There's this fairy tale..."

She was cut off by a knock on the door, which then opened to reveal an elderly lady pushing a trolley laden with what appeared to be snacks.

"Anything from the trolley, dears?" she asked.

They all stood up to take a look.

"Do you have anything sugar-free?" asked Hermione. Upon receiving a negative answer, she sat back down.

"How can you have sweets without sugar?" Neville asked her, mystified. While Hermione started to educate Neville about tooth rot and sugar substitutes, Harry investigated the trolley.

As the woman had said, it was full of sweets. Harry would have liked lunch, but unlike Hermione he wasn't scared of his teeth rotting. If Dudley had survived with them all intact, then he could indulge in a Mars Bar or two.

There wasn't anything he recognised on the trolley, however; wizard sweets seemed much more elaborate than muggle ones. They were expensive, too; it was two sickles for a chocolate frog, and five for a box of Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans. The other sweets were only a sickle apiece, but they didn't seem to do anything special. Harry compared to cabbage, which was three knuts a kilo, or nutritive potion, which was twelve sickles a firkin—that was enough to feed someone for months.

He shook his head and bought himself one of everything, even though he felt a little guilty. He couldn't let Petri's stinginess rub off on him, or he'd go mad.

Hermione looked disapprovingly at his selection. Neville had bought himself several cauldron cakes and licorice wands.

"I just wanted to try all the things," Harry said. "I've never seen anything like this. Are you sure you don't want any?"

"No thank you," she said.

Harry opened up the Every Flavour Beans and popped a white one into his mouth. Then he promptly spat it back out.

"What?" asked Neville.

"Soap, I think," said Harry, sticking out his tongue to air it. Neville made a face. Harry offered him the box.

"Thanks," said Neville. He chewed cautiously. "Strawberry."

"Lucky," said Harry. Next he got grass, grapefruit, and tomato, which were all tolerable. He wondered what spell or potion was used to make these highly realistic flavours, and whether it could be used in cooking. Maybe if he combined it with a nutritive potion he could make it taste like something good.

"Some of these aren't sweet," he said, holding the box out to Hermione. She looked cross, but after an awkward few seconds took a dark gray bean.

"What did you get?" Harry asked, hoping it hadn't been bad.

"I'm not sure," she said. Her face was screwed up in concentration. "It tastes a bit like peanut butter, but not."

"Sesame?" Neville asked.

"Probably," Hermione agreed. The sesame bean seemed to warm her up to the concept, and they split the rest of the box amicably. Hermione had enviable luck and did not get any of the disgusting ones. Harry and Neville got their fair share, including gems like earwax, vomit, and sand.

Then Harry picked up the chocolate frog.

"They jump," Neville warned. "I don't like eating those. They're too realistic. It reminds me of Trevor. Wait, Trevor!"

The toad was gone from the seat. Neville got up and searched under the seats and through the pile of sweets, but there was no sign of the toad.

"I've gone and lost him again," he said miserably.

"Again?" Hermione asked. Neville nodded.

"He's always trying to get away," he said.

"He must have got out when the trolley lady came," Hermione deduced. "Maybe we can go and ask around the train. Maybe someone's found him."

"We could try summoning him," Harry suggested.

"Is that a spell?" asked Hermione.

"But you can't summon living things," Neville said.

"You can," said Harry, thinking of what Petri always said about overcoming magical flows. "It's just much harder."

"Let's ask an older student," said Hermione.

"Let me try," said Harry, even though he didn't think it would work. His summoning charm was rather terrible. " _Accio Trevor_ ," he said, pointing his wand out the compartment door. He waited awhile, but it didn't seem like anything was happening. "All right, let's ask around."

Hermione went alone, up the train, and Harry went with Neville in the other direction, since it looked like a stiff wind could knock the timid boy down. Harry wasn't too keen on barging into other peoples' compartments either, but he felt emboldened with company, even if Neville was a nervous wreck.

In the first compartment there were some polite second or third years—Hufflepuffs, judging by their ties—who told them they hadn't seen a toad. They had no luck in the next two compartments either.

At the fourth compartment, the door was answered by a heavyset boy who reminded Harry strongly of Dudley, except not blond. He spied Draco Malfoy inside, and wondered whether it would be too rude to simply leave without saying anything, but then Neville stammered his question.

"A toad?" Draco drawled in disbelief. "If I had a _toad_ , I'd lose it as soon as I could."

His friend and another, similarly large boy, guffawed, as if he'd said something particularly witty, and Neville shrank into himself.

Then Draco noticed Harry. "Oh, it's you," he said. His face screwed up a little, and Harry took some pleasure in seeing how he was obviously trying to remember his name, but couldn't.

"Hello, Draco," said Harry. He wondered if Draco would conclude that, since he couldn't remember it, Harry's name must be unimportant, but it seemed that the other boy at least remembered that he wasn't a mudblood.

"Hello," said Draco, clearly still at a loss. "What are you doing with toad boy?"

"He's my friend," said Harry firmly. Beside him, Neville brightened up considerably.

Draco seemed to consider this an endorsement, because he got to his feet and pushed his large friend out of the way to hold out his hand. "I'm Draco, Draco Malfoy. That's Crabbe, and that's Goyle." Goyle was the Dudley lookalike, while Crabbe was taller and had a square jaw. They both grunted and gave little other acknowledgment.

"Neville Longbottom," said Neville, without stuttering. He shook Draco's hand cautiously.

"Pleasure to meet you. Good luck finding your toad," said Draco, and though he obviously did not mean it, Harry took it as a sign of good will that he had bothered to say anything at all.

Any good spirits Neville might have worked up were dashed rather quickly as they went through compartment after compartment without any sign of Trevor. They even met a fourth year Hufflepuff named Cedric Diggory who offered to try the summoning charm, but he couldn't manage it either, and looked a little dejected. Harry assured him that summoning living things was very advanced, but he didn't look too pleased to be hearing it from a first year who hadn't even been sorted.

In the last compartment, a red-headed boy was sitting alone, nibbling rather miserably at a sandwich.

"Excuse me, have you seen a toad?" Harry asked.

"Wha—?" the boy asked, crumbs dribbling down his front. "A toad? No," he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. Harry found himself comparing yet another person to Dudley. He had the whole set—someone with Dudley's looks, someone with his personality, and now someone with his manners.

When he looked at it that way, he supposed that none of the people he'd met were all that bad after all.

"Oh, okay," said Harry.

"Wait," said the boy. "You're first years, too, right? I'm Ron Weasley. What're your names?"

Harry and Neville introduced themselves.

"Do you want to sit with me?" Ron asked.

"Sorry, we already have a compartment," Harry said.

"Can I come with you?" Ron blurted, standing up. His ears turned red, but he remained standing.

Harry thought he seemed a bit desperate. "Fine," he said, glancing at Neville, who nodded as well.

The walk back to the compartment was spent in awkward silence, Neville too timid and Ron too embarrassed to start a conversation. Harry simply had nothing to say.

Hermione had not returned by the time they got back. Ron got several sandwiches out of his pocket as he sat and was shooting envious looks at the sweets piled on the middle seat. Neville sat down with a deep sigh, obviously still worried about his toad.

"Trade you a cauldron cake for a sandwich," Harry said to Ron.

"Er, you don't want these, they're dry," Ron said, but Harry stuffed the cake into his hand.

"I haven't eaten real food in a year," he said, and a slack-jawed Ron let him remove the sandwich from his grip.

"What do you _mean_ , mate?" Ron asked, looking Harry up and down as if expecting him to be a skeleton.

"Nutritive potions, you know," said Harry. "Provide a full meal's nutrition in one vial? No?"

Ron looked horrified at the thought. Harry gave him a sympathetic look.

"They're as bad as they sound," he said. He unwrapped the sandwich and bit into it. The salty flavour was heavenly. "This is brilliant," he said.

"My mum made them," said Ron faintly.

"Your mum's brilliant," said Harry, and Ron's ears turned pink again.

"Here, you can have the rest," he said, and Harry passed him the chocolate frog in return. After hearing Neville's description, he wasn't sure he much wanted to eat it.

"Thanks," they said at the same time.

Ron unwrapped the chocolate frog and expertly caught it as it attempted to hop away. Neville averted his eyes, but Harry watched the animated frog curiously. It was obviously enchanted, and not entirely trivially, at that. He wondered why someone had gone to such lengths to spell a sweet. Maybe it was to add value, so they could justify selling it at such an exorbitant price, or to differentiate it from other chocolate products.

Ron bit off its head, and it fell still. He finished off the substantial piece of chocolate with great alacrity, and then pulled a stiff, pentagonal card out of the wrapper.

"Blodwyn Bludd," said Ron. "I've got him already," he said, holding out the card. "Here."

Harry took it and read the entry. Apparently, Bludd was a vampire who was famous for singing to his victims before biting them. Harry thought it was a bit of an odd thing to be famous for.

"What do I do with this?" Harry asked.

"Collect it," said Ron. "I've got over five hundred."

Harry immediately tried to calculate how much gold five hundred chocolate frogs would cost. That would make a thousand sickles, which was over fifty galleons! Then again, perhaps chocolate frogs cost less elsewhere than they did on the Hogwarts Express.

"Neville, do you want it?" Harry asked. Neville took the card and looked at it.

"Oh," he murmured, blanching as he read it. He glanced nervously at Harry.

Just then, the compartment door opened, and Hermione entered, clutching Trevor to her chest, though Harry noticed that she had used the edge of her blouse as a sort of sling.

"Trevor! Thank you!" Neville cried, reaching out to take his toad. Hermione traded it for the chocolate frog card.

"What's this?" she asked, her eyes darting back and forth across it very quickly.

"Blodwyn Bludd," said Ron.

"I think it's pronounced like 'Bleethe,'" said Hermione. Ron's face scrunched up incredulously.

"He's a bloody vampire," he said. Harry wasn't sure whose point that helped.

"Don't swear," said Hermione, crossing her arms.

"I'll bloody swear if I like," said Ron petulantly, though he looked away the moment he said it. Hermione huffed.

"What's your name, anyway?" she asked. "I'm Hermione Granger."

Harry was surprised she had thought to ask, after all that, but he supposed she _had_ come back to the compartment to find an unknown, rude boy sitting in her spot.

"Ron Weasley," said Ron.

"You're in my seat," Hermione informed him, but she pushed some of Neville's licorice wands aside and sat down next to him instead.

"Mental," Harry saw Ron mouth.

"How'd you find him?" Neville asked Hermione, regarding his toad.

"I found the prefect carriage," Hermione explained. "It's up at the front of the train. One of the seventh year prefects did the summoning charm."

"That's brilliant," said Neville. "I wish could cast that charm."

"Want to learn?" Harry asked. "I'm no good at it but I know the theory."

"Where did you learn it?" Hermione asked. "It isn't in any of our spellbooks."

"My, er, uncle has this book, the _Complete Compendium of Charms._ He's an enchanter," said Harry. "I read about it in there."

"You know magic already?" Ron asked.

"He knows the levitation charm," Hermione said. "Show him."

Harry was a little annoyed to be expected to do magic like it was a trick, but he didn't as much mind the opportunity to show off a little. It had been hard work, learning the spells he had.

He cast the levitation charm on the fallen chocolate frog wrapper, directing it onto the seat with the pile of sweets. Ron looked impressed.

"Fred and George, my brothers I mean, gave me this spell," he said. He reached into his pocket and, to everyone's surprise, pulled out a fat, slumbering rat. Hermione squeaked a little.

Ron proceeded to chant a rhyme and tap his rat with a flourish of his wand. Nothing happened.

"Er, are you sure that's a real spell?" Hermione asked.

Ron turned bright red. "I should've known," he muttered. "They're always playing pranks."

"I think the spell you're looking for is ' _colovaria,_ '" said Harry, remembering the first proper charm he'd ever learned. "Look."

He cast it on the rat, but to his surprise and embarrassment, nothing happened, not even a blotchy change.

"Er, it usually works," he said. "Let me try again."

He couldn't manage it the second time, either, despite putting all his focus into it. He felt like he'd swallowed a stone, with everyone there watching him like that.

"It's all right," said Ron. "You don't have to."

"I can do it," Harry insisted, frustrated at this sudden trouble with a simple spell. Maybe the idea of a yellow rat was just too preposterous. He pointed his wand at the seat. " _Colovaria!_ "

The entire front side of the compartment turned a solid sunflower yellow. Not even the sweets were spared. Only a gaping Ron and his stubbornly grey rat remained untouched. Harry flushed a little, this time in exertion and concern that he had overreacted.

"Wow," said Neville.

"Ron, is your rat magical?" Hermione asked, considering it shrewdly. Of course! Harry couldn't believe he hadn't thought of that in the first place. He knew that living things were harder to charm than non-living ones due to their innate magical flow, but a magical rat would be even more difficult than a regular one.

"Er, I don't think so," said Ron.

"It has to be," said Harry. "Magical things are much harder to charm than nonmagical ones." Ron gave his rat a slightly more appreciative gaze.

"I s'pose that's pretty wicked," he said. "But what can he do? All he does is sleep."

"Maybe that's his power," said Neville.

"What kind of power is that?" Ron demanded, and Neville wilted slightly.

Since Neville didn't ask about the summoning charm again, Harry turned his attention to his sweets, and tried a jelly slug. It was rather disgusting. The licorice wands were all right, as well as the pumpkin pasties, and there was also a relatively ordinary chocolate bar with a caramel centre that he thoroughly enjoyed.

Soon, a prefect came by to tell them to change into their robes, and that they would reach the station soon. She did a double take at the sight of the bright yellow side of the compartment.

"What happened here?" she demanded.

"Er, overenthusiastic colour-changing charm," said Harry. The prefect had to cast the cancellation charm twice to get rid of it, obviously having initially underestimated the extent of the charm.

"Please refrain from casting any more magic before we get to Hogwarts," she said, before moving on to the next compartment.

Harry and Neville were already dressed in their robes, but they stepped out and Hermione and Ron took turns changing.

"Did you walk through King's Cross in your robes?" Hermione asked them.

"King's Cross?" Harry asked.

"The station," said Hermione with an air of impatience.

"I flooed in," said Harry.

"We apparated," said Neville, looking green at the thought. Harry winced sympathetically.

"Apparition, I read about that. It's like teleporting," said Hermione, "but what's floo?"

"You don't know about floo?" asked Ron incredulously. Hermione glared at him.

"It's travel by fireplace," Harry explained. "You put this powder in the fire and then say where you're trying to go, and it feels like you're going through a tunnel really quickly."

"Oh," said Hermione. "I suppose that, er, makes sense. But Ron, isn't your family magical too? You said your brothers gave you that prank spell."

Ron mumbled something about "lots of people," and "can't afford," turning red.

Not long after they had finished changing into their robes, the train slowed and then screeched to a halt. Harry stuck his head out the window, but it was too dark to see anything properly.

A disembodied voice announced that they should disembark, and that their trunks would be taken up to the school for them. Harry scrambled to stuff his forgotten Herbology text back into his trunk before he followed the others out. Neville was struggling to fasten his cloak up ahead in the darkness. Harry had forgotten his cloak entirely. He shivered as he stepped off the train.

It was cool and misty on the platform, and difficult to see around the press of moving bodies. Harry stumbled as he was pushed from several directions at once, and lost sight of the others who had been in his compartment. He tried in vain to catch a glimpse of Hermione's bushy hair, and finally resolved to just follow the flow of the crowd.

A swinging lamp at the side of the platform caught his attention, and then he did a double take at the sight of the man holding it. He was massive, easily twice as tall as Harry and several times as wide, and sported a beard like an overgrown bush that spilled down his front.

"Firs' years, firs' years, over here!" the giant man shouted. Harry managed to extricate himself from the sea of students and join the smaller group that had congregated around the man.

The platform cleared out soon enough, leaving only the first years.

Harry found himself towards the back, no familiar faces in sight.

They began to move, following the giant man. Harry heard gasps up ahead, and as he finally rounded the corner with the rest, he found the cause—a majestic, sprawling castle could be seen on the opposite shore of a dark lake. A thousand firelit windows twinkled, sending pinpricks of light dancing across the distant surface of the water. Harry blinked rapidly, dazzled.

"No more th'n four to a boat," said the large man, and Harry noticed for the first time that there was a long row of narrow boats on the rocky bank. He was one of the last, and everywhere he looked there were already four in each boat, until he came to the end.

He had to hold back a groan, because in the boat were Draco Malfoy and his two large friends. Harry gave it a sceptical look, trying to determine whether it was lower in the water than the adjacent ones. Seeing no other option, however, he climbed in and sat down in the only available space, right beside Draco.

"Hello," said Draco.

"Hello," said Harry.

The boats began to move on their own, sliding almost silently across the dark waters. No one seemed inclined to say anything more, which Harry was perfectly fine with. Draco was craning his neck to take in the sights, all poise forgotten, and Crabbe and Goyle were as reticent as they had been on the train. Harry followed Draco's example. Everything was murky at first, but as his eyes adjusted themselves to the gloom, they discerned the canopy of a vast forest to their left.

Between the forest and the castle, Harry saw a peculiar wooden structure surrounding an empty field, at either end of which were large metal hoops mounted on tall poles.

"That's the Quidditch pitch," said Draco, following his gaze. "Do you play?"

"No," said Harry. He was aware that Quidditch was some sort of sport played on flying broomsticks, as he had seen teenagers ogling the display of brooms in the window of Quality Quidditch Supplies in Diagon Alley, but beyond that he knew little else.

"No broom of your own?" Draco asked.

"No," said Harry. "Do you have your own?"

"Well, no," Draco admitted. Harry vaguely recalled that Draco had boasted that he was going to get his father to buy him one before, and he was a little viciously satisfied to hear that the spoilt boy had not succeeded. Lucius Malfoy earned a point over Vernon Dursley in Harry's book, though that really wasn't saying much, seeing as both he and Uncle Vernon were right there at the bottom of the list.

"First years aren't allowed brooms anyway, right?" Harry said equitably. Draco nodded, though his face looked pinched.

There was a shout from up ahead, and Harry looked up to see that they were about to pass underneath a rocky outcropping. Though he ducked as they approached, tendrils of ivy still tickled his head.

The boats docked themselves in a little underground bay. Everyone clambered out, and Harry wasted no time in losing Draco, trying to make his way toward the front. He managed to find Hermione up by the doors, just in time to see them open up to the large man's knocks, as if collapsing under the weight of his blows.

It was only an illusion, however; someone had drawn them open from the other side, and that someone was soon revealed to be a stern, bespectacled witch. Her face was replete with frown lines and she wore her black hair pulled into a severe bun.

"That's Professor McGonagall," Hermione whispered.

"The firs' years, Professor McGonagall," said the large man, confirming her remark.

"Thank you, Hagrid. I will take them from here," said Professor McGonagall. She opened the door fully, and the first years entered as a mob. The hall beyond was massive, comparable to the Gringotts main hall with its marble facades and mounted torches. Harry felt dizzy looking up. The ceiling was lost behind a criss-cross of landings and staircases that seemed to go on forever. Conversation from behind another large set of double doors to the right echoed through the hall.

Professor McGonagall herded everyone into a small chamber off to the side, and gave them a speech about the four houses. Harry located Neville when she shot a disapproving gaze in his direction, presumably due to his scruffy appearance.

Ron's red hair stood out as well, and Harry saw him rubbing at his nose vigorously. Right behind him, Harry spotted Draco Malfoy snickering into his sleeve. He scowled.

People speculated in hushed voices about the sorting, but it was otherwise quiet enough that Harry could hear every word. Ron said to the boy next to him that he thought it was some kind of test, but as he cited his older brothers, who had already proven to be unreliable, Harry tried not to put too much stock in his words. Nobody else spoke up to disagree with him.

Beside him, Hermione was mumbling spells under her breath, all from the _Standard Book_. In fact, if he wasn't mistaken, she seemed to be reciting the index. He shook his head in disbelief, though he couldn't help going over his own spell repertoire in his head.

 _Diffindo_ was still his main offensive spell, not counting any illegal dark magic, though _incendio_ could be an attack in a pinch. But this was a school, so he thought perhaps _locomotor_ or even the dancing-feet spell might be more useful, since they showed mastery over different magical properties. If the test wasn't about charms, though, Harry knew he would be at a great disadvantage...

Somebody screamed, and Harry glanced up along with everyone else in time to see ghosts flying out of the wall.

"I read about the Hogwarts ghosts in _Hogwarts, a History_ ," Hermione told him under her breath. "They're actually guardians of the castle. The exception is the poltergeist, Peeves, who does pranks. They didn't explain why he's allowed, though."

Harry nodded absently, uncertain why she had felt the need to explain it to him. He hadn't got that far in _Hogwarts, a History,_ but he knew plenty about ghosts. He had learned all about them back before he had been allowed to do magic, and had therefore been stuck with theory. A ghost was just a spirit conjured at the moment of death. Usually they were self-conjurations, due to a desperate need to continue existing for some task or other, but there was also magic that could force the dying to become ghosts. Ghosts took up a lot of magic and usually did not last very long, but Harry supposed that in a place like Hogwarts where magic was performed all the time, they could persist indefinitely.

By the time the uproar over the ghosts had died down and one of them had tried to start a conversation with the first years, Professor McGonagall had reappeared to tell them to queue up. There was some shoving as some people tried to get to the front and others tried to get to the back, but they straightened out quickly enough with a stern look from the professor. Harry managed to get a place behind Hermione.

Professor McGonagall led them into the main hall, and immediately Harry stiffened as he felt the evaluating weight of a thousand eyes. As they walked down in front of four long tables of students, he found himself blinking rapidly, dazzled by the flickering light reflecting from sparkling golden platters and cutlery. An upward glance revealed rows upon rows of blazing candles, hovering in midair.

"It's bewitched to look like the sky outside," Hermione said, citing _Hogwarts, a History_ again, and Harry followed her gaze up to the ceiling, which indeed appeared to open up into the heavens. Harry wondered how someone had even begun designing such an enchantment. His first thought was simply to make a transparent ceiling, but that was obviously not the case here—if he looked closely, he could see at the edges that the "sky" curved down to meet the walls and that the wispy clouds actually hung below it, fully inside the hall.

Harry quickly looked back down as he felt the person behind him step on his heel, and he hurried to close the unsightly gap that had opened between him and Hermione. The line of students curved to proceed before a raised table where all the staff were seated, and they came to a stop once the last of the first years had rounded the corner.

Everybody was staring in Professor McGonagall's direction, and Harry craned his neck to see past Hermione's bushy curls. There was a stool beside the professor, and on top of it a large, scruffy-looking hat.

As he watched, the hat seemed to tear itself open, and then it began to sing. Harry stared at it, somewhat dumbstruck.

Polite applause followed its ode to the houses, and Harry clapped his hands together distractedly as he wondered how the hat worked. How could it sort, if the sorting was based on personality characteristics? Did it read minds? It was possible.

He glanced to the side. Directly above him, Headmaster Dumbledore sat in a throne-like chair, beaming widely at the gathered students. He was dressed in rich, dark velvet, and looked powerfully content, like a king among his adoring subjects.

Professor McGonagall began calling them forward one by one to be sorted, and Harry was relieved to note that she was doing it in alphabetical order by surname, and that he would be in the middle of the pack.

When Hermione's name was called, she exited the line very quickly and marched up to the stool. Harry finally had a good view as he purposefully left a bit of space in front of him. She stuffed the hat on her head, sat down, and, several seconds later, it shouted, "GRYFFINDOR!" just as she had wanted.

After her came a Greengrass, Daphne, who went to Slytherin, and then Malfoy's large friend Goyle, whose first name was apparently Gregory, was also sorted to Slytherin, where he sat down across from their other friend, Crabbe.

Harry stopped paying much attention as more names he didn't recognise went by, but looked up again when Neville was called. The boy looked like he was stepping up to the gallows, and was so nervous he tripped over the hem of his cloak on the way. People laughed, rather unkindly, Harry thought.

Neville spent an eternity under the hat, and when it at last declared him a Gryffindor, he ran toward the table with such alacrity that he took the hat with him. McGonagall called after him and he had to make the embarrassing trek to return it.

Draco went into Slytherin instantly. Harry wondered why everyone took varying lengths of time to be sorted, but each reason he thought of seemed as good as any other. He would have to wait his turn to find out.

A pair of Indian sisters were sorted into different houses, and then a pale slip of a girl went to Hufflepuff, and then it was Harry's turn.

The hall erupted into hushed conversations the moment his name was called, and he stepped out of line with sudden trepidation, his heart pounding in his ears and his hands clammy. It was quickly evident that nobody was actually watching him, however, and he relaxed. Of course, with such attention to his name, it ought to be nearly impossible for anyone to notice him. He was effectively invisible.

He walked right past a distracted McGonagall, who was still looking around above his head, and put on the hat.

The brim slid down his face, only stopping at the bridge of his nose, and entirely obscured his vision of the hall.

"Difficult," he heard in his ear, and jumped, before he realised that of course it was the hat talking. "Exceedingly difficult. Courage and determination, I see, and insatiable curiosity to match. A bit of a sense for justice, and a lovely drive to succeed there. How interesting… where shall I put you, then?"

The hat was asking him? Harry had no idea. It was just like when he had thought about it before. There was Gryffindor, but he wasn't sure he fit so well there, even if the hat had called him courageous. He was no great enthusiast for book-learning, unless it was the only way, but after Hermione had gone to Gryffindor of all places, he wasn't sure what kinds of people went to Ravenclaw any more. Despite himself, Draco's and Neville's attitudes toward Hufflepuff made him less inclined to want to go there, especially as it seemed to fit him the least. Finally, the way people spoke of Slytherin also did not make him eager to join it.

"Not Slytherin?" asked the hat. "Slytherin will help you on the way to greatness."

It wasn't greatness, exactly, that he wanted, Harry thought, though he couldn't quite place his ambition elsewhere, either.

"Gryffindor, then?" said the hat.

Harry shook his head, forgetting that it could see what he was thinking. He didn't think Gryffindor was exactly _right_ , either.

"Are you sure?" the hat asked again. "Gryffindor will open the path to fame and fortune."

Fame was something he'd already eschewed, and fortune already his, Harry thought.

"Well, if you're sure, then better be RAVENCLAW!"

The hat shouted the last bit for everybody to hear. Harry stood up, feeling a little numb. Of course he'd known in his head that if he eliminated Hufflepuff, Slytherin, and Gryffindor, that Ravenclaw was the only thing left, but he felt a little bitter that he hadn't been given any time to reconsider.

He put the hat back on the stool, mindful that he did not want to experience Neville's humiliation, and walked over to the blue and bronze table which was applauding him politely, though there were looks of confusion on several students' faces. Harry guessed that they were astonished to have forgotten his name already. It was becoming a common response.

Harry sat down at the end of the table next to a blond first year. Spotting the other boy's Ravenclaw tie, Harry remembered to touch his wand quickly to his own and murmur, "Ravenclaw." The black lightened until it was blue, and the grey stripes glimmered bronze.

The rest of the sorting went by rather quickly. Oliver Rivers and Lisa Turpin were the only others to join Ravenclaw. Ron Weasley went to Gryffindor, where it appeared the rest of his family was as well, and finally Blaise Zabini joined Slytherin, ending the sorting ceremony.

McGonagall left with the Sorting Hat, and then the hall fell completely silent as Professor Dumbledore got to his feet.

"Welcome," he said, and though he spoke quietly, there was also great power behind his words. "Welcome to a new year at Hogwarts! Before we begin our banquet, I would like to say a few words. And here they are: Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak! Thank you!"

Everybody applauded as he sat down, and Harry followed along, though he hardly grasped what the old wizard had said.

"What's that supposed to mean?" asked the boy sitting next to him.

"He always says rubbish like that," said an older student.

"Robert!" the girl next to him said in exasperation. "He's obviously telling us to let go of our insecurities."

"How do you figure that?" asked Robert sceptically. The first years leaned closer to listen for the girl's answer.

"Nitwit," she said.

"Hey!" said Robert.

"No, you nitwit—that's the point. We Ravenclaws don't want to be nitwits, Gryffindors don't want to blubber, Hufflepuffs don't want to be oddments. And Slytherins must not want to be tweaks," she said.

"What's a tweak?" Robert asked flatly.

The girl didn't respond for a minute, and frowned, turning a little pink. "Well, I don't know, but it's obviously something bad."

"Right," said Robert. He sounded sceptical, but Harry thought her theory had been pretty convincing.

A delicious smell wafted up to his nose, and Harry glanced down, jumping as he finally noticed that food had appeared on the golden platters in the centre. It was more food than he had ever seen in his life, and more varieties of it too.

As people around him began to help themselves, Harry reached out to take some roast beef and potatoes. His fantasy had become reality, and he'd hardly needed to lift a finger. If all Hogwarts meals were even a tenth as decadent as this feast, they alone would make coming to school worth it.

"Is the food magic?" asked Oliver Rivers, a weedy boy with a very large nose.

"You can't magic food," said Lisa Turpin, who was sitting right next to him. She cut a piece of lamb and chewed it daintily.

"What?" demanded the blond boy beside Harry. "Of course you can magic food, how do you think it's cooked so quickly?"

"I think she means you can't conjure it," said the boy on his other side.

"Oh, well, you could've said. 'Magic' is very vague, you know. By the way, what are all your names? I know they said them during the sorting but I only paid attention to the people after me. I'm Anthony Goldstein."

He looked to his right, so Harry said, "I'm Harry." When people looked at him a little oddly for omitting his surname, he added, slowly, "Potter," and grimaced as it failed to register. Hopefully they would remember his first name, at least.

Then they went across to Lisa Turpin and Oliver Rivers, and beside them were Padma Patil and Morag MacDougal, and then the older students.

"I'm Robert Hillard, prefect," said Robert.

"Penelope Clearwater," the girl who had explained Professor Dumbledore's speech said. "Also a prefect."

Then Harry had to crane his neck to see the other first years who were all on the same side as him.

Mandy Brocklehurst was a tall girl with a somewhat sour expression on her face, and Sue Li was the opposite, small and grinning. Then there was Michael Corner, a boy with long, black hair hanging around his face and practically obscuring it. The last to be introduced was Terry Boot.

"So who are all the professors?" Anthony asked the prefects.

"Next to Dumbledore's McGonagall, but I suppose you already knew that," said Robert.

"Don't start from the middle," Penelope told him in exasperation. "On the far right there is Hagrid, he's the groundskeeper." Harry looked up and saw the giant man who had taken them across the lake.

"They wanted to know the professors," Robert pointed out. "That's our Head of House next to Hagrid, Professor Flitwick. He's the Charms professor."

Harry perked up at hearing that. Charms was the one subject at least that he had to excel at. The name Flitwick sounded very familiar as well. A glance at the little old man and his incredibly pointed face reminded Harry of a goblin. Harry thought one of the goblins he'd met at Gringotts was named Flitwick—perhaps they were related. A familiar pang of regret hit him briefly.

"That's Professor Babbling… she teaches Ancient Runes and you won't have that until third year. It's an elective," Robert said, pointing to a witch wearing a floral pointed hat with a thick black band. He moved his hand. "Then there's Professor Burbage, for Muggle Studies. That's also an elective."

"Professor Quirrell's back," said Penelope. "Look, that's him, isn't it? In the turban? Do you think he's taking over again?"

"But Burbage is still here," Robert protested.

Harry didn't hear his next words, however, because when he looked over at Professor Quirrell there was a sudden, stabbing pain in his forehead. He slapped his hands to his face in surprise, but it didn't stop him from seeing how Quirrell was looking right at him, an intent expression on his face. The moment ended, as Quirrell looked away sharply, and when Harry blinked it looked like the turbaned professor was engrossed in conversation with Professor Babbling, making him wonder if he had imagined the whole thing.

Only, his scar still hurt.

"Are you all right?" Penelope asked him, and everyone turned to look at him.

"Fine," Harry said, not wanting to make a scene. "Er, go on, about the professors." He cut a piece of meat and put it in his mouth so that people would look away, and to distract himself from the residual inexplicable pain.

"That's Professor Sinistra. She teaches Astronomy," Penelope said, pointing to the witch on Professor Dumbledore's right.

"You skipped Kettleburn," said Robert.

"They're not taking his class," Penelope said. "And he'll probably be gone by the time they do. He's been saying he'll retire for years now. Anyway, we already mentioned Professor Quirrell. I don't know what he's teaching if it's not Muggle Studies."

"Defense Against the Dark Arts?" Robert suggested.

"Him?" Penelope said sceptically. "Well, maybe. That's Professor Snape next to him, he's the Potions professor and the Head of Slytherin House, and that's Professor Sprout, Head of Hufflepuff and the Herbology professor. Also Professor McGonagall is the Head of Gryffindor."

"Isn't it unfair that she's also the Deputy Headmistress?" asked Lisa.

"Yeah, unfair for the Gryffindors," said Robert. "I heard she barely has time for them. She doesn't even have set office hours. They're by appointment."

"Flitwick has office hours twice a week," said Penelope, "and you can go talk to him about anything."

Lisa asked Penelope about what "anything" entailed, but Harry wasn't as interested, and he saw that some of the other first years had moved on to their own conversations as well. Anthony was shovelling potatoes into his mouth.

"Anthony," said Harry. "I was wondering, are you related to Queenie Goldstein?"

"Yeah, she's my first cousin, twice removed. Or was it second cousin once removed? Something like that," he said. "Why? You know her?"

"She wrote a book that I like," said Harry.

"What book?" Anthony asked.

"It's called _Witch's Brew,_ " said Harry.

"What's it about?" asked Anthony.

"It's a cookbook," Harry explained.

"You like cooking?" Anthony asked, sounding mystified.

"There are lots of interesting spells involved in cooking," said Harry a little defensively.

"Yeah, weren't you the one talking about magic food?" Terry pointed out, having been listening to their conversation.

"Well, yes," said Anthony. "I didn't mean anything by it. Do you know spells already? My mum didn't want me doing any magic at home. She's muggle."

"I know some charms," said Harry.

"My father showed me a couple of prank spells," said Terry. "Do you know the jelly-legs jinx?"

Harry and Anthony shook their heads.

"Well it makes your legs feel like jelly," said Terry. "I can show you."

"Er, no thanks," said Anthony.

"I didn't mean _on_ you," said Terry.

"Well, how else are you going to show us, then?" asked Harry sensibly, and Terry didn't have an answer.

"I tried a couple of spells," said Oliver from across the table. "The only one I got to work was _lumos_. My family's all muggle."

He sounded a little despondent.

"Nothing wrong with muggles," said Terry.

"Do you think I'll be behind?" he asked.

"Nah," said Terry. "None of us know any useful spells yet. I mean, do you think they're going to teach the jelly-legs jinx in lessons?" He laughed, and Harry decided not to mention all the coursework-relevant charms he knew, as the other first years nodded along.

"Besides, most people have family that's muggle," said Anthony. "I'm half-blood myself."

It turned out that Terry was pure-blood, but Harry offered that he had a muggle aunt.

The conversation died down at this point in favour of food. Harry tried some lamb stew.

There was a horrible, bitter taste in his mouth, and he had to resist spitting out a half-chewed mouthful of food. His tongue was suddenly burning, however, and when he attempted to swallow the feeling only got worse. He was suddenly struck with a terrible sense of impending doom, and he glanced around rapidly, trying to find some source.

He sneezed violently, and was finally reminded that he was allergic to garlic. He felt short of breath.

"What is it?" Penelope asked him, obviously having noticed his distress. Anthony put a concerned hand on his shoulder.

"Allergy," Harry wheezed.

"Get him to the hospital wing," said Penelope, and she and Robert stood up at the same time.

"Get Valencia," said Robert.

"Right, right," said Penelope, but an older girl, presumably Valencia, had already come up behind her.

"What's going on?" she asked.

"Allergic reaction," said Penelope. Valencia ducked underneath the table in lieu of going around and slid expertly beneath the bench.

Harry felt horribly hot, like he was burning from the inside. He stumbled as Valencia helped him to his feet, and his legs felt like jelly. He thought vaguely that this must be just like the jinx Terry had wanted to show them.

"What's going on here?" somebody else asked distantly. The burning feeling had sent his senses spiralling into oblivion.

He had a vague recollection of sudden weightlessness and then an endless falling feeling. Someone was levitating him, he thought. He must have passed out, because when he opened his eyes again he was lying on a bed, covered in scratchy white sheets.

The girl who was probably Valencia and the goblin-like Professor Flitwick were looking down at him in concern, as a witch in white robes waved her wand over him.

"This is no ordinary allergy," she said. "How do you feel, dear? Can you breathe all right?"

Harry took an experimental breath of air. It was cut short as he hissed in pain, but he tried again and confirmed that he could manage it.

"It hurts," he said, his voice raspy. "It's garlic," he added.

This seemed to help, because the witch, presumably a nurse, cast some spell and he suddenly felt loads better.

"Thanks," he said.

"Can he go back, then?" asked Valencia.

"Go back?" the nurse rounded on her. "Absolutely not. He needs to recover in a tranquil environment."

"You return to the feast, Miss Dawlish," said Professor Flitwick. "I shall remain until he recovers."

"No, professor, I'll stay, you can go," said Valencia.

"I don't want you to run late for the prefects meeting," said Professor Flitwick.

"That's not until later," Valencia protested.

"But you must meet with the Head Boy beforehand, correct?" asked Professor Flitwick.

Valencia nodded slowly, eyebrows furrowed. "Well, yes. I'll go then. Thanks, Professor."

She left, glancing back once or twice as she did, and Harry took a moment to look around the room. It was filled with empty white beds, separated by curtained screens. He supposed it was a hospital of sorts.

"You were aware of this allergy?" the nurse asked Harry.

"Yes, but I forgot," he said. "I don't normally eat food."

Both Professor Flitwick and the nurse looked very startled at his statement, so he added, quickly, "I just drink nutritive potions. You know, the ones that substitute for meals."

The adults immediately appeared relieved, though Harry couldn't see why. Had they thought that he was starving or something?

"You don't drink, other things?" the nurse asked, like she was hedging around something sensitive.

"What? Oh." Harry finally made the connection. "Blood? No. I'm only a _tiny bit_ cursed," he said.

"Normally," the nurse began, and Harry's heart sank a little at hearing this word, "a sensitivity to garlic only begins to show at a late stage."

There were stages? That didn't sound good at all. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"How many times have you been bitten?" the nurse asked.

"Once?" said Harry, though he began to doubt it even as he said it. What if there had been other times? Silviu had proven himself capable of erasing memories. The fact that he couldn't think of any other time was immaterial, and he didn't put much stock in Silviu's promise. But he had been within Petri's sights almost all the time, or failing that, inside the trunk. Petri definitely would have noticed an incursion into his trunk. That was what his security measures were supposed to prevent!

"Did you drink the vampire's blood?" the nurse asked him.

"Er," said Harry, the possibility never even having occurred to him, after the lengths Petri had gone to to prevent that from happening. "I don't know. I don't remember. It's possible," he said uneasily.

The nurse and Professor Flitwick looked very concerned.

"But it's fine," Harry said. "I don't have any problems with sunlight and I don't drink blood. It's just the garlic."

"There could be hidden effects," said the nurse.

"Is there a way to check?" asked Professor Flitwick.

Harry didn't like that they suddenly seemed to be talking over him, as if he weren't there. The nurse told Flitwick that there was no way to know for certain, that she knew of, and that he'd be better off consulting the Defence Against the Dark Arts professor.

"I feel fine," Harry said, injecting himself into the conversation. "I really do. It's the first night. Can't I go to the dormitories with the others?"

Whatever the nurse had done earlier had worked, and he was more concerned now with being known as the boy who had to go to the nurse on the first night. It was something Dudley and his cronies would have teased him mercilessly about, and though the other first years at his table had seemed nice, Harry knew all about seeming nice now.

Silviu had seemed nice.

"Poppy, he has a point," said Professor Flitwick. "It's best to let him settle in normally."

"But," the nurse began, but she stopped after taking a long look at Harry. "Very well. But come right back the moment you feel anything amiss now, young man," she said.

Harry nodded, even though he had no intention of following through.

"We'll need to let the elves know about his allergy," said the nurse.

"I shall see to it," said Professor Flitwick. "Are you ready, ah, Mr..."

"Potter," said Harry, eagerly pushing aside the sheets and swinging his legs over the side of the bed. Thankfully he was still clad fully in his school robes and not some hospital garb. He didn't expect the sudden wave of dizziness and the black spots in his vision as he got to his feet, but he shut his eyes tightly and stood still for a moment. He was relieved to feel better when he opened his eyes again, and though the nurse was watching him with hawk eyes, she made no comment.

Professor Flitwick was staring at him as well, though in a different way that was almost bewildered. Harry stepped away from the bed and glanced at him expectantly, and the diminutive professor shook off whatever was troubling him and took the lead.

"We'll go straight to Ravenclaw Tower," he said. "I imagine you'll be wanting to get to bed."

"Where are we?" Harry asked as they stepped out of the hospital room, straight onto the narrow landing of a carpeted spiral staircase. On the wall hung a portrait of a woman clad in lime green robes. She turned her back to them as they approached. Harry wasn't sure if he liked the movements of this painting. He'd seen plenty of moving pictures before, in the newspaper, but they always went through preset motions, like a programme in the telly. Something told him that the woman in the portrait was reacting to them in real time.

"This is the hospital wing," said Professor Flitwick. "We're on the fourth floor. This staircase here will take you right down to the Grand Stair on the ground floor."

Indeed they did; Harry saw the familiar entrance hall of the castle, now from above as they exited the hospital wing's spiral staircase. Without the suits of armour concealing the shallow corners, it was now clear that the chamber was actually seven-sided. Professor Flitwick led him across the first floor landing and down a hallway, where they stopped before a sheer drop.

He glanced up, and Harry followed his gaze to the next landing. As he watched, the staircase creaked and then rotated with a grinding sound, settling into place with a heavy groan in front of him. They hurried up the stone steps.

"Is this safe?" Harry had to ask.

"Why would it not be?" Professor Flitwick asked, apparently genuinely puzzled. Harry shook his head.

"Never mind," he said. He remembered Neville's story about falling out of the window and bouncing, and Petri's insistence that if he wasn't a mudblood, his magic would protect him. He supposed it wasn't that far from one landing to the next. And even though Hogwarts did accept mudbloods, they still had to pass the stringent power requirement of the Book of Admittance, which would snap shut to prevent the names of the weak from being written down. He'd read it in _Hogwarts, a History_.

They walked through so many winding halls and up enough moving staircases (Harry counted four, or perhaps it was five) that he was hopelessly lost and convinced that he wouldn't be able to get back down to the entrance ever again.

"Ravenclaw Tower," said Professor Flitwick as they ascended part of another spiral staircase, this one thankfully stationary, and came to a heavy door outfitted with a brass knocker in the shape of an eagle's head, and no visible doorknob.

The knocker opened its beak wide. "What does a transfigured creature feel?" it asked.

"A tricky one," said Professor Flitwick. "As you can see, the entrance to Ravenclaw Tower does not demand a password. Instead, you must answer the knocker's question."

Harry didn't think that that was particularly good security.

"Nothing," he said. "A transfiguration is magic, and magic can't create real will." He didn't know much about transfiguration, but he did know that much about magic. Then it occurred to him another interpretation, and he added, "And a creature transfigured into an object is an object, and does not feel."

"Yet a creature transfigured into another creature feels just as the original," Professor Flitwick pointed out. Harry frowned. He hadn't thought of that.

"Well reasoned," said the knocker, and the door swung open.

"Was I wrong?" Harry asked.

"You were quite right," said Professor Flitwick. "As you can see, our answers together were sufficient."

Harry wasn't completely satisfied with that, but he forgot his reservations when he stepped inside. They had entered a large, open space, carpeted and wallpapered in rich blue. Sturdy-looking chairs of dark wood, upholstered in matching shades, were organised around wide, rectangular tables with glass tops. A wooden staircase coiled along the interior walls of the tower, allowing access to a series of nooks which were lined with full bookshelves.

The ceiling went farther up than he could see, swallowed up by darkness. However, the room itself was well-lit by candelabras placed against the walls on evenly spaced ledges, and Harry imagined that it would be bright and airy during the day, with sunlight allowed to stream in from any direction through a dozen tall windows.

On the far side of the room, a life-sized, marble statue of a woman wearing a crown with a sparkling sapphire was prominently displayed on a pedestal. She seemed to watch over the room like a benevolent goddess. Professor Flitwick led them towards this statue, and Harry saw an inscription on the base that said, "Wit beyond measure is man's greatest treasure."

They ascended the spiral staircase, and as they passed the alcoves with the bookshelves he noticed that they were far deeper than they had first appeared, extending back tens of feet and curving out of sight.

"The first year dormitories this year are nearly at the top," said Professor Flitwick, sounding apologetic. Harry didn't mind the walk too much, but he supposed that it might be an annoyance if he were in a hurry.

They stopped by the sixth book nook, whose archway had a small bronze plaque etched with "1" hanging at the top, and entered it. Harry found out that the hallway in the back led to another, very tight spiral staircase, this one stone. They must be in one of the turrets. The only light came from tiny square windows placed every two full rounds, which let in only the most meagre starlight, just enough to prevent him from tripping if he trailed his hands firmly along the rough walls.

He felt a little dizzy as the steps seemed to get narrower and narrower, and was relieved when they came to a cramped landing with two tall wooden doors on each side and a large, pentagonal window straight ahead. Harry peered through it and reeled a little as he discovered just how high up they were; he could see clear past the forest, even though it seemed to go on for miles, all the way to the silhouette of a black mountain he hadn't even realised was there before. The half moon hung perilously low on the horizon, just peeking over the mountaintop.

"Boys are on the left," said Professor Flitwick, and he opened the door and held it for Harry, motioning for him to enter.

Harry did so, and saw that no one else was there yet.

"Your dorm mates will be up shortly," said Professor Flitwick. "I suggest you get settled in. I will distribute timetables tomorrow at breakfast, which starts at 7:30. Lessons begin at 9:00."

Harry nodded. "Thank you, sir," he said.

"Good night," said Professor Flitwick, nodding.

The semicircular room was spacious and contained six wooden four-poster beds outfitted with heavy, dark blue hangings. Beside each bed was a low chest of drawers that doubled as a side table and a round, three-legged stool. Trunks in varying colours and states of wear had been placed at the foot of all the beds, and Harry spotted his in front of the third bed.

Not entirely pleased with the spot, he switched his trunk with the one closest to the exit. He figured that what Terry Boot didn't know couldn't hurt him.

There was a door on the other side of the room. Harry opened it to find the bathroom, a long, rectangular space that was tiled up to shoulder-height, with two sinks on one side and two curtained shower stalls on the other. At the end there was a wooden door that Harry guessed led to the toilet.

Curiosity satisfied, he returned to his bed and changed out of his robes and into his nightgown. Just as he had extracted his toiletries from his trunk, the main door opened and the his dorm mates poured inside.

"Finally!" said Anthony, the first to arrive, and murmurs of agreement echoed from behind them. "Oh, you're here already," he said, noticing Harry. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine," said Harry, feeling a little embarrassed at the way the other boys peered at him uncertainly. "It was just an allergic reaction. I went to the, er, hospital wing and the nurse fixed me up. Did I miss anything?"

"You missed afters, mate," said Terry, patting his stomach. "And the Headmaster made a speech, a real one this time, and then we had to sing the school song, but it doesn't have a set tune, so it was a mess."

"It wasn't that bad," said Oliver.

"It was a mess," Terry repeated. "Are those our trunks?"

The boys found their assigned beds, and nobody seemed to have any complaints, not even Terry, whose things Harry had moved.

A pale boy with very short black hair, whom Harry didn't remember from the feast, took the bed right by his.

"Sorry, what was your name again?" Harry asked the boy.

"Stephen," was the response. Stephen held out his hand, and Harry shook it.

"Harry," he said.

"I sat with my sister at the feast," Stephen said, explaining why Harry hadn't seen him.

"What year is she?" Harry asked.

"Third," said Stephen. "Do you have any brothers or sisters?"

"No," said Harry. He couldn't think of what to say next, but Stephen seemed satisfied with the extent of their conversation and ducked behind his bed hangings.

Harry hurried to the bathroom to brush his teeth before the others had the same idea, but in the end only Oliver joined him, the others apparently too knackered to bother. Harry finished up first and tumbled onto his bed. It was more comfortable than anything he'd ever slept on before, and the linens were soft and luxurious. He fell asleep almost instantly and did not dream.


	23. Schoolboy

Harry woke to the rustling of his dorm mates as they busied themselves with unpacking and getting dressed. Checking the time with his wand, he saw that it was seven thirty, which meant that breakfast had already begun.

They went down as a group, and found Penelope waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs.

"How was your first night?" she asked them. They all shrugged and mumbled under their breath. She turned to Harry. "You alright?"

"I'm fine, thanks," said Harry, glancing at his toes. He hoped people would forget the previous evening's garlic incident quickly, before it could get any more embarrassing. Penelope seemed to accept his answer, thankfully.

"Let's wait for the girls," she said. The girls, and Robert, apparently, because he was the last to arrive. He slid down the banister and Penelope glared at him.

"What? Everybody does it," he said. "It's not against the..." he trailed off, wisely, and looked away.

The prefects ensured that they found their way to the Great Hall without mishap. This early in the morning, the Ravenclaw table was sparsely occupied, mostly by sixth or seventh years, it seemed. The first years gave them wide berth and sat at the other end. A glance around the hall told Harry that the other tables were even emptier.

Professor Flitwick stood up from the head table, disappearing behind it for a few moments before clearing the end and meeting them. He had a stack of parchments tucked under his arm.

"Timetables," he said, waving his wand. The parchments distributed themselves among the first years, and Harry reached up to grab his as it drifted lazily about his head.

Charms was his first lesson, he was glad to see. There was one place where he definitely wouldn't be behind. Then he had double Defence Against the Dark Arts, and after lunch, Herbology.

A quick comparison told him that all the first year Ravenclaws had the same timetables.

"I can't wait for Defence Against the Dark Arts," said Terry, as he speared a sausage.

Harry, reasonably sure that there was no garlic to be found in most breakfast foods, buttered himself some toast and nibbled at it.

"What do you think we'll learn?" asked Anthony as he finished his eggs. "Jinxes maybe?"

"It's called _Defence_ Against the Dark Arts, not the Dark Arts," said the sallow-faced blond girl who Harry thought was called Mandy. "So it'll be counterjinxes."

"Counterjinxes are jinxes too," Terry said.

"They aren't," said Mandy.

"I think they are," Lisa interjected, but nobody had any proof to back up their claims either way.

"We have Charms first. What do you reckon we'll do there?" asked Anthony.

" _Lumos_ , I expect," said Harry. It was widely regarded as the easiest charm, after all.

"That's the one that lights your wand?" asked Lisa. Harry nodded. He got a second piece of toast and put marmalade on it, indulging himself. And then he might have a muffin, and an egg—the food he had dreamt of for so long was all in reach.

Suddenly, he became cognisant of a whooshing sound, and then a shadow passed over the table. Owls, hundreds of them, streamed into the hall, flowing through the rafters and swooping down here and there to deliver letters. Harry reeled in surprise when an owl dropped a letter into his lap. He was convinced it was a mistake until he picked it up and saw his name written on the back in tight cursive.

He didn't get a chance to read it, however, because the prefects had got to their feet and were beckoning for the first years to gather round. Harry stuffed the letter in his pocket and the rest of his toast into his mouth.

The prefects didn't escort them to their classrooms, but they did give fairly detailed instructions about how to get to each one, which Mandy wrote down and Anthony claimed he would remember. Then it was time to go.

They just followed Professor Flitwick as he left the hall, on the suggestion of Lisa, who said it would be easier than finding it on their own. It had been a good idea, even though it was almost a straight shot to the third floor classroom from the Grand Staircase, anyway.

The result was that the Ravenclaws were almost fifteen minutes early. Professor Flitwick left them to settle down in the classroom and disappeared into his office.

They capitalised on their early arrival to claim the front rows. There was room at each desk for two students, and as students paired up, it became quickly obvious that there was an odd number of first year Ravenclaws. Soon it was just Harry and Oliver standing, and Sue alone at a desk. Oliver hurried to join Sue, and Harry took a seat in the second row, behind Anthony and Terry.

Harry was a little annoyed at being the odd one out—it reminded him a bit of being picked last for any team activity in primary, but he told himself he was being silly. Somebody had to sit alone; it was a fact of numbers.

It was also a fact of numbers that somebody had to be picked last.

Nobody had been picking anything. Harry had just been slow to sit down.

The classroom door opened, and a bushy head of hair peeked through. It was Hermione.

"Is this Charms?" she asked.

"Yes," said Harry, when nobody else answered for a perilously long moment. Hermione pushed her way inside, looking as if she was struggling a bit with the door, and made a beeline for Harry.

"Hello Harry," she said, dropping down into the seat beside him without asking, not that Harry would have said no. Her bookbag struck the floor with a heavy thunk, like it was made of stone.

"Did you bring all your books?" Harry asked a little incredulously. He hadn't brought any of his. In fact, he didn't even have a bookbag, and had just stuffed some folded parchment and a quill into his pockets.

"Just in case," said Hermione.

"I thought you already knew them by heart," said Harry.

"It's just in case," said Hermione again, with emphasis.

"We only have three subjects today," he said, trying to count the spines through Hermione's bag. There were at least five.

"We didn't get timetables until breakfast," said Hermione.

"Right, us too," said Harry, acknowledging her point. He glanced around. "Where are the other Gryffindors?"

"Still at breakfast, I expect," said Hermione, and for some reason, she wrinkled her nose. "Can I see your timetable?"

Harry extracted it from his pocket, a little rumpled, and passed it to her. She put it on the desk next to her own.

"I've got Flying on Thursday, not Wednesday. Oh, and Potions is Friday morning, not afternoon," said Hermione. "Everything else looks the same."

Harry nodded, glancing around the classroom. There were only eleven Ravenclaw first years, and he didn't think there had been a lot more in any other house.

"I reckon all the first years share most lessons," he said.

But it wasn't true. A minute later, the door opened wide and a flood of all Gryffindors entered, filling in the majority of the back seats. Harry tried to find Neville or Ron, but they must have moved behind him before he could spot them.

Professor Flitwick stepped out of his office with a scroll, and opened it up to take the register.

Something very peculiar happened when he got to Harry's name. He squeaked as he said it, looked around vaguely, and when Harry indicated his presence he toppled off the stack of books that he had been standing on in order to see over the podium. Harry hoped that it wasn't a side effect of the _fidelius_ charm that would happen on a daily basis. At least none of the other students would be capable of associating him with the phenomenon.

Professor Flitwick recovered, finished taking the register, and then began to lecture. He wasn't bad, but he didn't say anything that Harry hadn't already known, so he didn't take notes. There was something distinctly different, impersonal, about getting instruction as part of a group. Perhaps Petri's individual attention had spoiled him.

Then again, Harry was pretty sure that Professor Flitwick was not allowed to torture anybody for failing or asking stupid questions, so that was a positive.

They didn't end up doing any spells, not even the wand-lighting charm, but they did get homework. It was just reading, so Harry thought it would be fine not to do it, since he already knew the material.

He looked askance at Hermione's full scroll of notes. Hadn't she already read the entire first year book as well? He compared her efforts to his own bare desk, untouched except by his elbow, for leaning purposes.

"That was fun," said Hermione, as they walked out the door and queued up at the landing to wait for the moving staircase to come their way.

"Hm," said Harry noncommittally.

"Finally," Lisa was saying to Stephen, "I thought we'd never get out of there. And there's still two more periods before lunch."

"But it's Defence Against the Dark Arts," said Stephen. "Aren't you interested?"

"We aren't going to learn any spells," said Lisa.

"I bet we will," said Terry.

As they ascended the staircase and rounded the corner, they were blasted with the pungent odour of garlic. Harry breathed in a lungful, and then let it out carefully, waiting. There was no urge to sneeze. He took another experimental breath and confirmed that he was not about to have an allergic reaction.

The Defence Against the Dark Arts classroom reeked. Harry was surprised he wasn't convulsing on the floor, after what had happened at the feast last night, and the way conjured flowers had sent him into an immediate sneezing fit. Perhaps the smell was fake.

"I bet it's to ward off vampires," said Terry from next to him. They each had a small desk to themselves, and Harry had picked a seat in the midst of his Ravenclaw housemates.

"Don't be silly," said Lisa, before Harry could reply. "Hogwarts has much better protections against vampires."

"Like what?" asked Terry. Lisa didn't answer, obviously unsure.

"I don't think it's real garlic," said Harry. "I'm allergic to garlic, remember?"

"That was because of _garlic_ , last night?" Terry asked. Harry nodded uncomfortably. "That's rough, mate."

"Yeah," Harry agreed.

Then the teacher walked in. It was one with the purple turban, Professor Quirrell, after all.

Harry eyed him nervously, but his scar didn't hurt again.

"H-hello everyone," Professor Quirrell stuttered, glancing here and there sharply. Harry tried not to meet his gaze. He heard somebody snickering in the back of the classroom.

Professor Quirrell began to take the register, stumbling over every other name, and Harry wondered what would happen when he reached his name. Would he physically stumble, like Professor Flitwick had?

"Harry P-p-pot—Potter," said Professor Quirrell.

"Here, sir," said Harry.

Professor Quirrell looked straight at him.

It happened again. Reflexively, Harry looked up to meet his eyes, and there was stabbing pain in his forehead, like something was trying to claw its way out of his head.

He was brought back to reality by a thump and a comparatively mild throbbing in his leg, which had kicked out and struck his desk. He put a hand to his forehead, breathing a little heavily, as Quirrell continued with the register.

He wondered if he should go back to the hospital wing after all, and see the nurse, but almost as soon as he had the thought he discarded it. He didn't want to return there unless it was an emergency, and anyway, he already had an idea of what the nurse would say.

It was a curse scar, incurable, and he'd be better off asking the Defence Against the Dark Arts professor about it.

What a pity that it was the Defence Against the Dark Arts professor himself who seemed directly linked to the pain. Harry didn't think it would be wise to bring it up.

"Oh yes, professor, whenever you look at me, I get an awful headache!" That would go over well.

"Welcome to D-d-defence Against the Dark Arts," said Professor Quirrell, and it became evident that his stutter was going to persist over the entire lesson. "Let-let's st-start with a sh-show of hands. Who here has enc-encountered a dark c-creature before?"

Harry raised his hand high. He'd most certainly seen many. Most of the other first years seemed uncertain, however, and, feeling a little awkward, he lowered his hand somewhat.

"D-don't be sh-shy," said Professor Quirrell, but this stammered exhortation was not exactly inspiring. Harry put his hand down after a few more moments, but apparently not quickly enough.

"Mr P-potter," said Professor Quirrell, "c-could you g-give an example?"

"A vampire," said Harry, and to his surprise, he heard some giggles from behind him. What was funny about vampires?

Professor Quirrell blanched, even as he nodded, and Harry noticed a dull, but growing pain building in his head again. "Oh, y-yes, v-v-vampires are m-most certain—certainly dark c-creatures. Nasty business. The thing to kn-know about vampires is that they're ah-always after your blood. If you s-see one, the best thing to do is just, just run. I m-met some v-vampires while I was in Tra-Transylvania. It was in Brașov, toward the, the, the early evening. Yes, they, they come out even when the s-sun hasn't fully s-set..."

Harry frowned as his headache continued to worsen, and Professor Quirrell continued to tell, very laboriously and tonelessly, about his encounter with the vampires. At first, he listened closely, wondering if the professor was going to impart some useful lesson on warding them off, but the anecdote soon migrated from vampires in the public library to a marvellous chase through back alleys that ended somewhere in the forest, where Professor Quirrell, unable to run further, had heroically prepared to stand his ground against his pursuers but found them mysteriously vanished.

Professor Quirrell provided no explanation for this turn of events, not even speculation as to what had occurred. In fact, he stopped speaking entirely for almost a minute, and stared ahead blankly, as if very suddenly lost in thought.

Harry stifled a sigh of relief as his headache eased momentarily. Unfortunately, it came back in full force when Professor Quirrell began to lecture about the difference between jinxes and hexes with no context, and between the pain and the unpredictable stuttering Harry found the remainder of the lesson incomprehensible.

Luckily, as it was the first day, Professor Quirrell declared the double period to be over a quarter of the way into the second hour.

"That was a bit odd," said Anthony as soon as they were out of earshot of the classroom. They were near the front of the pack, as Harry had been eager to get as far away from Professor Quirrell as possible. His headache had almost disappeared, which was even more evidence for the proposition that the stuttering Defence professor had somehow been causing it.

"It was odd, wasn't it?" said Anthony again, glancing around. He slowed and then stopped entirely, and Harry stopped as well, finally noticing that a gap had opened up between them and the other Ravenclaws.

"The lesson?" Harry asked. "I suppose it was."

"No homework," said Terry in a satisfied way as he caught up to them. Then Harry and Anthony were swept up by the pack of housemates.

"No homework, no learning," said Stephen, but he did not exactly look displeased. "I did have some trouble following the lesson, though."

"His stutter is awful," said Lisa, far less charitably, "and he's not organised at all. Useless."

Everybody, even Terry, looked a little stunned by her total dismissal of the professor, but nobody spoke up to contradict her.

"Where are we going?" asked Anthony, even though he was right in front with Terry.

"No idea, mate," said Terry. "Common room?"

"Common room's that way," Lisa said, jerking her head toward the staircase they had just missed. The landing opened up to thin air, its connecting stair clear on the other side of the principal heptagon.

"Never mind that, then," said Terry, even as all the girls, following Lisa's example, had already turned to stand beside the landing to wait for the next stair.

"I'm headed to the library to meet my sister," said Stephen. Harry was interested in the library as well, but he thought it would be awkward to follow Stephen now, as nobody else had moved to join him down the corridor.

"I've got a letter to send," said Michael. "Does anybody know where the owlry is?"

Nobody knew, but everybody had the same unhelpful advice to go higher in the castle, or to find a prefect or teacher.

Talk of letters reminded Harry of the unopened letter in his robe pocket. Suddenly seized by curiosity but aware that everybody else would try to read it too if he took it out now, he brushed his thumb over the stiff outline of the envelope against his robes and resisted the urge. Instead, he stepped back casually to join the group waiting for the staircase toward the common room.

It was closer than he remembered from the previous night, perhaps because it was the second time making the trip. The eagle knocker said: "Can a copy always be told from the original?"

"A copy of what?" somebody complained, but the knocker was not forthcoming with details.

"No way," said Sue. "There's mass production where you can make hundreds of copies of the same thing and you can't tell them apart."

"But then which one's the copy?" Mandy protested. "I mean, aren't they all really originals? None of them is copying another."

"But they're _all_ copies," Sue insisted.

"I think it means if you try to make a fake, like fake art," said Lisa.

"That's not what it said," said Sue. "That would be a loaded question anyway. If there's such a thing as fake and real then that means there has to be a way to tell."

Meanwhile, the door had swung open, apparently satisfied with the debate it had incited, and the other girls had gone inside. Harry stepped around the distracted trio and into the common room himself.

Unlike the previous evening and that morning, the room was well-populated—nearly every chair and cushion was occupied by older students with their noses buried in books or else quills and parchment in hand. Harry made his way up the spiral staircase in search of some privacy, breaking away from the girls, who had ventured deeper into the room in search of seats.

The nook that led into the first year tower was empty, so Harry paused at the end of the bookshelf, where the light from generous common room windows still reached adequately, and pulled out the slightly rumpled letter from his pocket.

He had expected it to be from Petri, but he did not recognise the cramped handwriting on the back, which read simply, "Harry." There was no surname or any other identifying information, but somehow it had been delivered anyway. Harry briefly entertained the notion that it had reached him mistakenly, but was quickly disabused of it when he actually unstuck the flap and viewed the contents.

"Dear Harry,

"I hope this letter finds you well. The last time we met, I was not entirely myself—figuratively speaking—and I wish to apologise for my abrupt treatment of you."

At this point, Harry glanced down to the bottom of the note in search of the sender and saw that the letter was signed, "Nic." So this letter was from the man whose vault he had got himself stuck inside. It had been months since that incident already. Why write now, with an apology, no less? Harry was thankful enough that Nic had let him go home without asking too many questions, but from that had expected never to see or hear from him again. How had the letter even found him? Frowning, he scanned the remainder of the letter:

"I thought that you might enjoy the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the similarities and differences between sympathetic and willed magic. Please accept my gift, inscribed here. I hope it will aid you in the future."

Beneath this was several lines worth of complete gibberish. Upon closer inspection, the glyphs in which it was written turned out not to even be Latin characters, but an eclectic mix of swirls, zigzags, and what looked like doodles of tiny birds. Harry frowned and turned the parchment over, but the other side was blank. He checked the envelope as well, though surely enough, it was empty. Perhaps the owl had failed to deliver the "gift."

That did not seem right, however. Was the "inscription" itself the gift? Frowning, Harry touched the unknown symbols and drawings, wondering what they meant. Perhaps there was some magic to them. Were they something like enchanter's shorthand? He drew his wand and tapped them, feeling foolish when nothing happened.

If only Petri were here, and he could just ask!

Of course he could send a letter, he remembered, but then thought of something even better—the teachers. He was at Hogwarts, a premier institution for learning magic. Surely, one of the professors would know.

Harry turned out of the alcove and hurried down the stairs, making for the large bulletin board hanging beside the common room door. Next to a glossy placard with the title, "Be Courteous to Your Peers," was a bit of parchment that listed Professor Flitwick's office hours, which were twice a week, but not at the same time each week.

Monday at 11 was _right now_. "What time is it?" Harry muttered to his wand, and he revised "right now" to "practically over," as it was quarter until noon.

Stuffing the letter into his pocket with a sigh, Harry decided that he might as well get to lunch. The prospect of real food cheered him up, and he retraced that morning's steps, finding the Great Hall with little trouble, despite the staircases and their poorly-timed rotations.

Most of the other first-year Ravenclaws were already seated at the end of the table, and Harry moved to join them, inserting himself in the wide gap between Terry and Oliver.

It did not escape him that some of the dishes edged away from him as he sat down. He made an experimental swipe at them, and they danced out of his reach.

"Those are garlic potatoes, mate," said Terry, leaving Harry to wonder furiously about how such an enchantment would work. How could they identify him, in order to avoid him but not others? Could it somehow be used to get around the _fidelius_ charm? Was it like that for everybody who had allergies?

"Oi," said Terry, "anybody home?" and Harry realised that he was sitting in front of an empty plate, gazing into the distance, and had not said anything since sitting down.

"Oh," he said, abashed, "I was wondering how the garlic dishes knew it was me."

"How the dishes knew?" Anthony demanded from across the table. "They're not sentient, are they?"

"Of course not; you can't make things sentient," said Lisa, apparently never one to let imprecise semantics go uncorrected.

"I meant it figuratively," Harry muttered, but it was too late, because Lisa and Anthony had already got embroiled in a debate about the finer points of animation. It quickly became evident that neither of them knew what they were talking about.

Harry prodded some chicken legs and, satisfied that they had no intention of escaping him, forked one onto his plate and dug in.

"Where did you go off to earlier?" Terry asked.

"Common room," said Harry. "What about you?"

"Me and Anthony went out by the lake. It's huge! I mean even bigger than I thought. I can't believe we went across it in those tiny boats. There's supposed to be a giant squid in there, but we didn't see anything," said Terry.

"A giant squid?" Harry repeated sceptically, though he was not overly interested. What good did a giant squid do anybody? Fortunately, Terry seemed more than capable of carrying the conversation all on his own, requiring only the bare minimum of input from Harry every minute or so. Harry focused his attention on lunch.

He relished in the texture of the savoury poultry between his teeth, how it began smooth and tender, and let itself be worked to a mush. Next, he tried the tomato soup. Consistent liquid as it was, it still infinitely eclipsed the nutritive potion in quality of experience. Couldn't they just add salt and herbs to the potion?

Of course they couldn't, said Petri's long-suffering, everybody-knows-that voice in Harry's head, because potions were incredibly responsive to contaminants until the moment they made contact with the drinker and came into effect. That was why they had to be stored in sealed, specially fashioned crystal or glass phials, and why adding sugar or salt before drinking was likely to turn them into something unpleasant. The real question, Harry reckoned, was what prevented Petri from adding a galleon or two to the food budget.

By the time Harry's spoon had scraped the bottom of his plate, Terry had already abandoned him as a lacklustre conversation partner and moved on to join Anthony in his ever-broadening debate with Lisa. She was still winning, judging by the smug grin firmly stretched across her face.

Harry checked the time and decided that it wasn't too early to start heading to Herbology, which, according to the notes on his timetable, would be outside the castle, in Greenhouse One. He stood up, and no one followed him for a long moment. Just as he was wondering whether it would be appropriate to sit down again, Oliver put down his fork and stood as well. They left the bickering trio behind after a series of unheeded backwards glances.

"What exactly is a magical plant?" Oliver asked. "Do they move or something?"

"Some of them," said Harry, thinking of the gigantic fanged plant that presided over the plot of one of his vampire neighbours. "But I think most of them just have magic properties for potions."

And apparently some of them had no exciting properties at all, like stinging nettles, which were as muggle as plants came and only had effects in potions when combined with other reagents. Professor Sprout guided them through the basics of safety and re-potting technique using this relatively harmless plant, all the while regaling them with tales of plants with snapping teeth, plants that dripped acid that could eat through dragon hide, and even plants that could reach out and strangle you if you didn't pay attention.

Harry decided that he didn't much like Herbology. The rash breaking out on his forearm from an incautious brush with their assignment might have been a contributing factor. Also, he and Oliver had ended up right next to Draco Malfoy's bookends, Crabbe and Goyle, who were decidedly not interested in following the lesson, and whispered inanities to each other incessantly. Harry wondered why they had dropped the silent gargoyle act; the conspicuous lack of Draco himself in the greenhouse altogether probably had something to do with it.

Crabbe turned out to have another name, Vince, which he apparently preferred, but Goyle was just Goyle, thank you very much, and potting plants was servants' work. This remark swiftly cost Slytherin five points.

"Old hag," muttered Vince under his breath, and there went another five points. Oliver paused in his work to roll his eyes.

Halfway through the lesson, an irate Draco Malfoy burst into the greenhouse, claiming to have overslept, even though it was late afternoon. By some miracle, no points or detentions were mentioned, and Professor Sprout simply gestured for him to choose a workstation. Predictably, he wedged himself between Vince and Goyle.

"Why didn't you wake me up?" he hissed to no one in particular.

Harry was a little amazed that Draco's excuse was actually true. Oliver mouthed, "Beauty sleep," to him, and smirked. Hesitantly, Harry smiled back, before turning to pat down the soil in their pot.

Both Vince and Goyle slouched contritely, but said nothing. Apparently, Draco had not expected a response, because he proceeded to sneer at the nettle.

"This is servants' work," he complained, though he had done little more than put on his sleek, heavy-duty gloves and oversee Goyle's messy trowelling. Fortunately for him, Professor Sprout was on the other side of the greenhouse this time. Unfortunately for Harry, Oliver snorted loudly.

"What's so funny?" Draco demanded. "I bet you've got plenty of experience with this, what with your kind grubbing around in the dirt all day. You'll find that real wizards have more class."

Before Oliver could get around to realising that he had been insulted, Professor Sprout came into earshot and distracted Draco with an offer to help him catch up.

"What was that about?" Oliver whispered.

Harry shrugged awkwardly and studiously avoided looking at anybody for the rest of the lesson.

Having been the first in, he and Oliver were the last of the Ravenclaws out of the greenhouse, and everybody had the same idea to shower after an hour elbow-deep in dirt and humidity. Relegated to the end of the queue, Harry decided to make do with a cleaning charm instead.

" _Scourgify,"_ he incanted. Itchy soap bubbles exploded over his left hand like a cancerous growth and boiled over onto the ground, where they vanished magically. He shoved his wand into his pocket and stuck his wand arm into the area of the charm. He still couldn't get the spell to clean without producing a ridiculous volume of soap, but it did the job.

Oliver declined similar treatment and opted to wait his turn for the bathroom.

Harry shrugged and sat down on his bed, wondering what to do next. There was still a good two and a half hours until dinner, and he did not have any homework to speak of, besides the Charms reading he had already decided not to do. Then he remembered his other "homework," the exercises which Petri had assigned him.

He retrieved the journal from his trunk and flipped through it. It was filled with even, slender cursive that had obviously been the product of a dicta-quill, and seemed to consist of short theoretical lessons, followed by some research questions and exercises.

The first one was on permanent animation. Harry groaned.

The bathroom door burst open and Anthony and Terry strolled out, embroiled in conversation. Harry snapped the journal shut and decided to relocate to the common room, where there would be better lighting and tables.

The common room was mostly populated by older students, probably sixth or seventh years, and they had taken all the good individual study areas, but Harry managed to find a spot around one of the larger tables, next to the prefect Robert, who was the only person he recognised.

"Alright?" said Robert, and they exchanged curt nods before proceeding to ignore each other.

Harry considered where he might get an apple to practice inspiring it with the animation charm. This exercise was more difficult than inspiring levitation, which he had finally managed with some reliability a few weeks ago, so he expected it would probably take him another few months to succeed at it.

Supposedly, if he could manage this, then it would help him improve at the "other" kind of animation, as well. Interested as he was in progressing beyond spiders, Harry still found the difficulty rather dispiriting.

He reached into his pocket for a quill and his hand brushed against crumpled parchment. The letter! He spread it out on the table and inspected the inscription again, as if hoping it would have made itself intelligible in the meantime, but it was as inert and meaningless as before.

Suddenly struck with an idea, Harry glanced over to Robert. The prefect was reading out of a cloth-bound, green book and making notes on a bit of parchment at the side. Harry waited for his quill to stop.

"Hey, Robert," he said.

"Huh?" said Robert, looking up.

"Could you, er, would you know what this means? Or what this is?" Harry asked, sliding the letter over to the right.

"Oh, those are Egyptian hieroglyphs," said Robert almost instantly.

"What do they mean?" Harry asked, heartened, but Robert shook his head.

"Sorry, no idea. They're _mentioned_ in Runes, but we never actually learned any. Maybe you could ask Professor Babbling. What are you doing with hieroglyphs, anyway?"

"Oh, er, a friend sent this. I'm not sure why," said Harry, stumbling over his words as he tried simultaneously to prepare a story that didn't seem ridiculous. Robert seemed uninterested in further details, however.

"Right," he said vaguely.

Harry was about to ask where Professor Babbling's office might be, and whether she held office hours like the House Heads, but then remembered that he could probably accost her in the Great Hall after dinner.

Except Professor Babbling did not appear at dinner. In fact, only about half the high table was occupied. Harry supposed that professor attendance must not be mandatory for ordinary meals.

"Excuse me," he asked Penelope, feeling somewhat reluctant to bother Robert a second time, "do you know where Professor Babbling's office is?"

"Third floor, past the Charms corridor, near this cluster of paintings full of fish," she told him.

Harry finished his food and hurried off, eschewing dessert again. He hoped she was still there. Where did professors go when they got off work? Did they live in the castle, or did they floo in every day?

He retraced the steps they had taken that morning to get to Charms, and strode down the curved corridor, past the classroom. There was a heavy door at the end, and Harry pushed at it, to no avail. It occurred to him that it might be locked, and he was considering whether to try a charm, when someone shouted, "You there!"

Harry whirled around in time to see Professor Quirrell's pale, serious face drawn into a cross scowl. "What are you d-doing?" he demanded, giving Harry the impression that he might be in trouble, though for what, he had no idea.

"Looking for Professor Babbling, sir," Harry said honestly. "Penelope, er, the prefect, told me her office is here."

This, apparently, was far enough from what Professor Quirrell had been expecting that he paused in consternation.

"The next cor-corridor is off limits," he finally said, which was news to Harry. There was no sign posted or anything. "P-P-Professor Babbling's office is that, that way," Professor Quirrell told him, pointing back down the Charms corridor and waving his hand, indicating an inward turn, "b-but I expect she's gone, gone home by now. What did you need her for? P-perhaps I can help."

If Professor Quirrell was hoping to have caught Harry in a lie, he was to be disappointed, because Harry was glad to accept whatever help was forthcoming. He withdrew the letter from his pocket, taking a moment to casually fold over the part with the message and leave only the hieroglyphs in view.

"This, sir" he said, holding it out. "They're hieroglyphs, and I want to know what they mean."

Professor Quirrell leaned over to take a look. Something in his gaze sharpened, and when he glanced at Harry, there was a stab of pain in his forehead that reminded him that the man's presence had not given him a headache, up until that moment.

"This is an inscription," said Professor Quirrell. "Have you activated it?"

"Activated?" Harry repeated. So there was some magic to it after all. "How?"

"Trace it with a quill. Anything," said Professor Quirrell. And Harry wished that it had occurred to him to try something like that. "You needn't know what it means to activate it. I suppose one ought to be cautious, but it appears it is only spelled to summon a book."

"Oh," said Harry, "Er, thank you sir."

He was somewhat eager now to get out of Professor Quirrell's painful presence, and to get whatever book Nic had sent him, now that he knew how, but Professor Quirrell appeared to have other ideas.

"Why don't you come along to my office? I can show you the process," he said, and Harry couldn't figure out how to refuse gracefully.

Fortunately, when Professor Quirrell began to walk, whatever was inducing Harry's headache disappeared as quickly as it had come.

Professor Quirrell's office was apparently right next to Professor Babbling's, which explained why he had been in the area. The walls were covered with newspaper clippings featuring prominent photographs of aeroplanes. They were all conspicuously still.

"I use to t-teach Muggle Studies," Professor Quirrell said when he noticed Harry eyeing the décor. "Those are aeroplanes. They're big flying c-contraptions made of metal."

Harry was going to say that of course he knew what aeroplanes were—even _Petri_ knew what aeroplanes were—but then decided that Professor Quirrell hadn't had any reason to assume that.

Professor Quirrell gestured for Harry to produce the letter again, and he took a quill from his desk and traced, without any ink, over the symbols. As soon as he finished, there was a sucking sound, and then a fluttering of sheets as the letter appeared to unfold, and unfold again, impossibly, until it had filled out into a leather-bound book.

The cover had the title stamped in gold leaf: _Secrets of the Hieroglyphical Figures._ There was no author.

"Ah, this book," said Professor Quirrell with clear recognition.

"What is it about?" Harry asked. The title alluded to hieroglyphs, as did the form of delivery, but Harry distinctly recalled that the letter had mentioned sympathetic magic, so it was hardly likely to be a language book.

"It's an alchemy reference," said Professor Quirrell. "Much of it draws from the work of Abramelin, an Egyptian wizard, on immortality. Dark magic. May I ask who sent you this book, Mr Potter?"

Worry hit Harry like a tonne of bricks. "Dark magic" and "Mr Potter" jockeyed for first position in the race to burst his heart. Of course he shouldn't have just trusted a strange man, especially not one who had asked very few questions after discovering a fake goblin in his Gringotts vault. He'd had no choice at the time, but this letter, he should have consigned to the fireplace, or at least handled with care and discretion. "I don't know who sent it," sounded moronic even in his head. On the other hand, did Professor Quirrell properly recognise him? No, he assured himself. That was impossible. Potter was just his surname, and surely it was a normal for a teacher to know him by surname rather than given name, even outside of a class context. But being around so many people who ought to know him must be stretching the _fidelius_. Could it have stretched too thin?

"Are you all right?" Professor Quirrell asked, and Harry became aware that he had gone silent for an inordinate amount of time, and that his hand had moved on its own to clutch at his forehead, where the killing curse scar throbbed feverishly.

"I don't feel too well," Harry said honestly, though he knew it sounded as if he were trying to get out of answering Professor Quirrell's other questions.

"What is it?" the professor asked, apparently believing him.

"Headache," said Harry.

"Shall I walk you to the hospital wing?"

"No!" Harry blurted out, unable to stop himself, though it made it seem more like he was faking. "No, sir, I, er, I just need to go, er, lie down."

"Today, during my lesson, you also did not seem to be feeling well," said Professor Quirrell. Harry nodded, shocked that the man had noticed something like that while remaining oblivious to how boring and confusing his own lecture had been. "Is it the garlic? Madam Pomfrey mentioned that you survived a vampire attack."

"Er, right," said Harry, though he thought "survived" made it sound much worse than it actually had been. "I don't think that's it, though. It's not real garlic, is it?"

"It's a property of my turban, I'm afraid. A spell, for repelling the undead."

"Oh," Harry murmured. That made sense, or at least, explained why his headaches only happened in proximity to Professor Quirrell, and apparently only to him. But he'd previously reacted to garlic by sneezing or asphyxiating—was this a new symptom?

He had a Defence Against the Dark Arts professor right in front of him, he reminded himself, and hadn't the nurse said herself that he would be the best one to consult on the matter?

"Garlic's never given me headaches before," he said. "Do you know if it's changing or, er, progressing? Can the curse do that?"

"Progress? Yes it can, if exposed to the right sort of magic," said Professor Quirrell, which was not at all reassuring.

"Is there a way to see if, er..."

"Yes. I can take a look, if you don't mind showing me the scar," Professor Quirrell said.

For a confused moment, Harry thought he was talking about the scar on his forehead, the one which hurt and which nobody should be able to properly notice—it didn't help that Professor Quirrell seemed to be looking right at it—but of course the professor meant the bite scar, and he was just making eye contact, like a normal person.

Harry nodded, undoing the first two buttons on his shirt and tugging his collar to the side. As Silviu had suggested was normal, the bite mark had healed almost entirely, but the pinprick scars were still visible to anybody who was looking for them. The professor raised his wand and sketched repeated figure eights in the air, in the vicinity of Harry's nose, muttering something unintelligible under his breath repeatedly. Harry felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, and a shiver overcame him.

Then Professor Quirrell's eyes narrowed, and Harry was hit with an almost blinding stab of pain in his forehead. He reached up to slap his scar, almost knocking his glasses askew, before coming to his senses and removing his hand quickly, hoping he had not interrupted the spellwork. But Professor Quirrell's wand was still, and he seemed to be lost in thought.

"P-P-Potter," he said suddenly, and then his expression went slack, and his eyes developed the glazed confusion that was more familiar to Harry when it came to the matter of his name.

Then Professor Quirrell's gaze refocused and he brought up his wand hand again, slightly jittery, and continued the same wand motion and muttering as before. The eerie, cold sensation returned.

Harry looked up at him expectantly when he finally stopped. "Sir?"

"The results are c-complex," said Professor Quirrell. "I, I need some time. See me after, ah, the lesson tomorrow."

"What spell was that, sir?" Harry asked. "A mantra?"

"That's right," said Professor Quirrell, surprised. "It's called the Evil Eye. Ah, a bit of a misleading name. No, no evil involved." He chuckled, a little self-deprecatingly. "D-don't forget. Tomorrow, after the lesson."

Harry nodded, pleased he'd guessed correctly, and turned to leave. Countless attempts to read Waffling's _Chant and Cadence_ had to have been good for something, and anyway, the spell had reminded him of the mantra Petri used to summon spirits. Professor Quirrell did not seem inclined to elaborate more, so Harry resolved to look it up himself. There was a library, wasn't there?

"W-wait," said Professor Quirrell, and to Harry's surprise, he turned to his desk, picked up the book Nic had sent, and held it out. "Your book."

"Er, but," Harry began, but then thought better of it. "Er, thank you sir."

He supposed it must be all right, then, dark magic or not. Nonetheless, he was careful to turn the spine down and press the title to his chest, and it was with some furtiveness that he made his way up to Ravenclaw Tower.

A couple of unfamiliar girls, perhaps second or third years, were standing outside, scowling. They perked up when they heard him approaching, and stared at him expectantly. Harry paused, not eager to insert himself between them, but one of them finally gestured impatiently.

"Try the knocker," she said. "We got it wrong, and it won't let us in or even talk to us anymore."

With some trepidation, he stepped up, and the bronze eagle asked, "Where do monsters live?"

Harry blinked, and the girl on the left nodded in commiseration.

"Yeah. And the answer isn't 'in the Forbidden Forest,'" she advised.

"It's not 'in nightmares' or 'under the bed,' either," said the other girl.

Harry frowned. What exactly did it mean by "monster," anyway? Earlier, the eagle knocker had opened up the door after enough people had answered in contradicting ways to start a discussion. Perhaps the trick to opening it while alone was not to answer too confidently, but consider multiple perspectives.

"It depends on what a 'monster' is," he began. "If it's just anything that does awful things, or is scary, well, anything can be scary, so monsters live everywhere, everywhere where anything lives." Harry thought of Silviu, and of Nalrod. "But sometimes, no, most of the time, nobody thinks they themselves are a monster, they just call other people, other creatures, monsters. So monsters don't live anywhere but in peoples' heads."

Harry thought he was really only rambling, but the knocker seemed satisfied and the door clicked and swung open.

"Nice one," said the first girl. "I'm Marietta, by the way. What's your name?"

"I'm Harry," said Harry, and shook Marietta's hand.

"I'm Cho," said the other girl, extending her hand as well. "Thanks for helping. That knocker is so annoying. I thought I figured it out after last year, but I suppose I got rusty over the summer."

"I don't think I've seen you around before," said Marietta. "Are you a first year?"

"Yeah," said Harry. "What year are you?"

"We're second years," said Marietta. "Well, talk to you later. Homework time. It's the first day and McGonagall's already laying it on us." With that, she and Cho went off to claim a study space in the corner.

Harry decided against reading the book where anybody could see it and ascended the stairs to the dormitory. Terry and Anthony were there, playing Wizard's Chess over a repurposed nightstand, and so intently that neither looked up as he entered. Harry sat down on his bed, drew the curtains, and cast _lumos_. The light was a little too bright at the source but dispersed quickly, and he spent a minute casting and recasting it until it suited his purposes, before leaning his wand awkwardly against his foot so that the quilt did not swallow the light. He wished he had a jar for bluebell flames.

Cracking open the book, he saw that Nic's letter had merged into the flyleaf, inclusive of the inscription. Harry wondered if tracing the inscription again would transform the book back into a piece of parchment, but decided not to try it just now.

There was more at the bottom the letter now, he noticed. Page references. The first one directed him to page one hundred sixty-eight. He followed it.

The chapter heading said, "Green: The Vegetable Soul." Harry blinked down at the strange phrase. He wasn't about to discover that spinach had a soul, was he?

There were notes scrawled in the margin in the same cramped handwriting as in the letter. The first one said: "Crucial step. Most fail here." A squiggly line led to the edge of a paragraph and inserted itself underneath the word, "sympathy."

"Growth can only be achieved with magical sympathy. Once the stone exhibits the colour of a vegetable soul, then it will have the power to multiply like a tree, branching infinitely. Therefore it can reach for infinitely small, infinitely precise places, and know the shape of any object."

These sentences made approximately zero sense to Harry, but fortunately there was another line in the margins that trailed down to the bottom of half of the page and a circled section.

"Sympathetic magic is magic that is done by magic. Just as moving your own body requires no deep understanding of the body, so does moving the properties of existence, that is, moving magic, require no deep understanding for a being of magic. But what of the wielder of magic, who is not himself a part of magic?

"This is the fate of the wizard, who has magic but never is, himself, magic. He must rely instead on his willpower, his ordinary way of understanding the world. His desires and his beliefs come together to shape his will. In order to grasp the will of magic, the wizard must desire nothing but reality, and believe nothing but the truth. But these two things are against his nature. His nature, therefore, is what he must overcome in order to succeed at this task."

Harry frowned. Sympathetic magic, according to this description, made sense, for example, in the context of vampires. If vampirism was a curse, then the way its magic worked was not really subject to the will of the vampire, but simply the operation of the curse. But what about other magical creatures, like goblins or hags? They were born just like humans, not made from magic.

The next page veered away from any further explication of sympathetic magic, and instead had instructions for drinking some potion and achieving the goals of "desiring reality" and "believing truth."

Harry flipped back to the beginning of the book and discovered from the introduction that it contained the instructions for making something called the Philosopher's Stone, which was apparently the pinnacle of alchemical creation, and could make the user live forever. A wizard named Abramelin, whom Professor Quirrell had mentioned, was indeed credited with the origin of this recipe, which the book claimed to be the only true recipe.

At the end of the introduction there were about three pages of warnings about how botching any step of the process, which took six years, if all went well, could result in a gruesome death, and that only an alchemist who had dedicated his life to his work should proceed.

If quality duplication was supposed to be nearly impossible, Harry did not really want to know how much harder attaining _eternal life_ would be.

He remembered, uncomfortably, the matter of the horcrux. But a horcrux didn't make somebody live forever. At best it offered two lifetimes worth of living, barring unforeseen accidents. This Philosopher's Stone was something else.

Nic obviously hadn't sent him the book so that he could try out an absurdly deadly alchemy recipe, anyway. Harry turned back to the flyleaf where the letter had been written, and checked the next page reference. It pointed him to a ten-page section that appeared to explain the sympathetic properties of what looked like every kind of metal, and how one could go about transfiguring them. Unfortunately, Harry didn't know the first thing about transfiguration, and so most of it went right over his head.

He sighed and shut the book, deciding to wait until he'd at least had his first Transfiguration lesson, which would be tomorrow morning. Instead, he wandered over to the other side of the room to watch chessmen bash each other to pieces for the remainder of the evening.


	24. Vampire

As it transpired, the first Transfiguration lesson was not the next morning, despite what it said on the timetable. Apparently, for this first week only, they would not have it until Thursday morning. Instead, their first class was History of Magic, in the afternoon.

Harry decided to put his free morning to use by exploring the castle. It was an impossibly bewildering maze. Despite the variety of portraits and tapestries hanging at intervals in every corridor and the eclectic collection of empty suits of armour that stood guard at the corners, there was something awfully uniform about the place, so that there was no telling whether he was on the second or fifth floor, or the east or west side. The moving staircases and dimension-defying passageways did nothing to help.

After an hour or so of aimless wandering of the upper floors, he happened upon the library, and decided that it was a good place to stop. He needed to look up the "Evil Eye" spell that Professor Quirrell had cast on him. Whatever the man had claimed, Harry did not trust anything that literally had "evil" in its name.

The library was a gargantuan oval chamber with a vaulted ceiling. Coloured sunlight streamed in through prismatic panes and blended with the candlelight from a dozen massive chandeliers, bathing rows of mahogany shelves in a warm gradient. The librarian's counter was directly to the left of the entrance, and behind it, towards the back, a thick rope had been drawn across the breadth of the room at waist height. Harry wandered closer to it, curious, and read the placard that hung from it: "Restricted Section."

He veered away quickly when he felt the librarian's hawk-like gaze burning into his side, and did not dare glance back at her until he had made it into the shadow of a tall shelf. She had returned to sneering at nothing in particular by then, and Harry stared at her for another few moments, marvelling at the permanently disgusted expression she wore. It looked like something had crawled up her nose and died there. He decided not to interact with her unless absolutely necessary.

It quickly became evident, anyway, that the shelves outside the mysterious Restricted Section were organised by school subject, and within each subject by the author's surname. Harry made for the Defence Against the Dark Arts section, and considered how he was supposed to look for a particular spell whose use he only had the faintest idea of.

Then it occurred to him that the spell was obviously not a transfiguration, so it had to be a charm. And the best place to start looking for a charm was, of course, the _Complete Compendium_. Unless it was an obscure, illegal curse, but Harry could not imagine that a Hogwarts professor would actually go about casting curses on students.

He identified the _Complete Compendium_ as the thickest book at the beginning of the Charms section. Hefting the tome from its place with a little help from the levitation charm, he ferried it to the nearest table unoccupied by older students and tapped the first page, murmuring the name of the spell.

Nothing happened, and he wondered hesitantly if the Evil Eye was perhaps a curse after all, but then he flipped to the next page and saw a table of contents. Most likely, this copy of the book was not enchanted.

It was not really too much more effort to find the spell manually, but accustomed to Petri's version as he was, he still felt some childish resentment at the necessity.

The Evil Eye (incantion _invideo,_ as a mantra) was a jinx that was cast using the eyes, and which required unblinking eye-contact with the target, explaining part of the name. It could be cast with the wand simply held loosely, but there was an optional double-looping wand movement, which Professor Quirrell had used. The purpose of the jinx was to disrupt enchantments and durative curses and gain temporary control over them.

While the jinx was in effect, the caster would receive impressions of the purpose of the targeted enchantments. That explained why Professor Quirrell had chosen this particular spell for examining the vampire curse, but Harry thought he had been skirting a rather fine line. A note at the end of the entry read that the Evil Eye could be considered a curse when used on a human, as it was a vehicle for indirectly laying other curses. A telltale sign of being targeted with the Evil Eye was a sudden urge to shiver, and the spell could be thwarted by wearing a charm that was aggressively enchanted to do absolutely nothing.

Harry tried and failed to get his head around the concept of such an enchantment. He couldn't believe he was missing Petri already for the second time in as many days away from home. A week ago, he would have been vehemently delighted to get as far away from that man and their bloody casket as possible.

Finally, he pulled a somewhat rumpled bit of parchment from his pocket to write it down.

He got as far as "Dear," and then wondered what he was supposed to put. "Master Joachim" sounded like what Ulrich would say, which was perhaps the right idea. But what if somebody intercepted the letter? It sounded completely ridiculous and paranoid, but now that the thought had occurred to him, he could not let it go.

"Dear Uncle Jochen," was the final verdict.

"How can you enchant something to do nothing? I read that it's the counter to the Evil Eye jinx."

Harry frowned at the note. Perhaps it was too brusque. Should he write about what had happened so far at school? Would Petri even care to read it?

"Hogwarts is good. The library is huge, but their copy of the _Complete Compendium of Charms_ is not enchanted. Charms class is very basic so far and I haven't had all my subjects yet, but I don't think I much like Herbology." He hesitated, wondering if he should mention the matter of the vampire curse. Finally, he settled on, "My allergies are getting worse. There's a professor who has a turban that's enchanted to ward off vampires and it makes my head hurt."

The letter was no literary masterpiece, so Harry decided to give up coherency altogether.

"I was sorted into Ravenclaw House. It's the one for bookworms. Hope you've been well. Yours, Harry"

Then Harry returned the _Complete Compendium_ to the conspicuous gap in the shelf and spent the rest of his free time before lunch searching for the Owlry so he could post his letter. He came upon it at the top of one of the corner towers, a narrow, cacophonous cylinder crammed full of wooden perches and carpeted with smelly owl pellets. He covered his nose with the front of his robe and sent his letter off one-handed with a moon-faced barn owl that was tagged with the Hogwarts crest on its leg.

After lunch was their first History of Magic lesson. Some of the students shrieked in fear or perhaps excitement at the sight of the professor floating casually in through the blackboard. Harry immediately decided that no good could come out of a teacher who arguably did not even have free will.

He was right. The lesson was quite possibly the most boring hour he had ever had the misfortune to suffer, and the knowledge that there were seven years of the same in store soured the experience even further.

Harry wondered if he could exorcise the professor, or perhaps torture him secretly until he gave up his afterlife, or at least reconsidered his teaching style, which could outperform the stunning spell any day at facilitating mass unconsciousness.

Unfortunately, Harry had enough sense to guess that if Hogwarts was still employing a clearly unfit ghost after all these years, then either nobody more competent was interested in the position, or there was not enough money to go around. He couldn't imagine that they were actually _paying_ Professor Binns, so he was probably good for the budget. It was the sort of thing Petri might do. Actually, it was exactly the sort of thing Petri did do, Harry thought, remembering the free labour provided by the departed apprentices.

Harry resolved to bring something to do next time, if only to avoid having to stare into space. He glanced around every ten seconds, wishing that he had at least brought the textbook; many of the other students who had not outright fallen asleep were reading it instead of paying attention to the professor. Literally only Hermione appeared to actually be engaged with the lesson. She was scribbling notes furiously, as she had during all the lessons the day previous. It was superhuman.

Herbology and Defence Against the Dark Arts were exactly as disappointing as they had been the first time, except that there was no free period after Herbology, so they all had to sit, stewing in their own stink and the pungent garlic odour of Professor Quirrell's classroom, for a full hour while he failed to deliver a coherent lesson, and jumped erratically from topic to topic. This time, there was homework to read about the charm to shoot red sparks out of one's wand, because they would be practising it the next day.

"My ap-pologies, Mr P-Potter," said Professor Quirrell, when Harry stayed behind to see him afterwards. "I'm still not f-finished analysing the results. P-Perhaps tomorrow?"

Harry agreed, eager to leave the vicinity of the man, though he could not fathom why the Evil Eye impressions might take multiple days to assess. The headache had not returned at all during the lesson, but that did not make the cocktail of sweat and garlic smell any more tolerable.

Professor Quirrell did not have any answers the next day, either, but at least the lesson had been a practical one. Harry had imagined that they would have some sort of red spark-duel, but in reality they had done a far more bloodless exercise in shooting them at the ceiling. The spell was easy, and Harry had got it on the third try, but a surprising number of other students had had serious problems making anything happen.

It was the first time many of them had ever used their wands, he realised.

Harry was seriously beginning to grow tired of Hogwarts and its apparently lacklustre teachers and subjects when at last, after a thoroughly uninteresting Charms practical involving the wand-lighting charm, which he could cast in his sleep, Transfiguration came around.

The Transfiguration classroom itself was a great novelty. It was a large, circular lecture hall on the first floor of the castle, just off a side corridor from the Grand Staircase. In the back, beside the massive, colourful windows, myriad silver cages full of strangely silent animals of all shapes and sizes were stacked or hung from hooks above a raised stage. Beneath them the student desks fanned out on a terrace in pairs.

Professor McGonagall, as tall and stern as on the first evening, stood stiffly at the lectern and waited for everyone to arrive, shutting the door with a precise snap of her wand after the last student. She began the lesson by changing her desk into a pig and back, and gave the serious declaration that Transfiguration was the most complicated subject at Hogwarts.

This was the sort of magic that Harry had come to learn.

Her lecture was interesting, for a change. The no-nonsense way in which she spoke reminded Harry somewhat of Petri.

"Transfiguration is the branch of magic dedicated to changing the property of Form. Form may commonly be thought of as an object's shape, but may also encompass its identity and even its existence. We will begin with, and spend the next few _years_ solely on transformation, the changing of one thing into another thing..."

Professor McGonagall told them that the key to a successful transformation was an understanding of the initial form, final form, and the process of transformation. This last point was especially important. A faulty conception of the process doomed the spell to failure.

Then she wrote what looked like an equation on the board, but with all letters. The difficulty of a transfiguration depended on five factors, assuming the caster's understanding of the spell was correct. The size, in absolute terms, of the initial and final forms was the main contributor to the difficulty. Then there was a factor, viciousness, which applied only in transfigurations involving living creatures.

Viciousness approximately corresponded to the willpower of the target. The willpower of the caster, commonly called "concentration," was also integral to the success of the spell. Then there was "wand power," which was the efficiency of a particular wand for casting Transfiguration. Professor McGonagall assured them sternly that this factor only became noticeably important at a level beyond the scope of what was taught at Hogwarts, and that everybody's wand would serve them perfectly well in her class. Finally, the most important factor was the similarity between the initial and final forms.

Similarity, Professor McGonagall explained, was not at all as simple as it sounded. There was not only similarity of appearance, but also similarity of use and, more interestingly, semantic similarity. It was easier to transfigure things that began with the same letter of the alphabet, for example. Professor McGonagall stressed that this ease came of a purely psychological reason, and was not an indication of any mystical correspondence of names.

In order to exploit this phenomenon, Transfigurers had developed their own alphabet for naming objects, so that the factor of similarity could be raised artificially for any arbitrary pair of initial and final forms. Actively increasing similarity through renaming, the professor informed them, was a very advanced application of Transfiguration, but they would be learning the alphabet this lesson and were expected to be able to read transliterated English fluently in it by the end of term.

She proceeded to write it out on the blackboard. There was a flurry of activity as everybody made to copy it down. Unlike enchanter's shorthand, which was full of arrows and slashes, the transfiguration alphabet consisted of circles and rectangles broken up by dots.

The reason for this relatively uniform appearance, Professor McGonagall explained, was to heighten the similarity between any two given letters, without compromising their distinctness. Words were also not written left to right, but in clusters, and often outlined by regular polygons in order to give them more visual symmetry. Symmetric things were easier to remember.

She proceeded to give some examples. The word "cat" was written vertically, in a rectangle, while "hag" was written in a triangle. She tapped the board, and a list of a dozen simple English words appeared in the top left corner.

"Your homework, to be handed in the next lesson, will include writing these words in the Transfiguration alphabet," she said, to a chorus of groans from the predominantly Gryffindor side of the room. The professor shot them a truly withering look that shut everyone up with alacrity.

"I would like to draw your attention now to the letters 'N' and 'M,'" said Professor McGonagall after everyone had noted the homework. "Notice how they are each a bent staff, reflections of each other."

The letter "N" looked like an upside-down Latin 'L,' and as the professor had pointed out, "M" was its horizontal reflection.

"A mnemonic for thinking of these two letters is 'M and N, Match and Needle.' You see that they resemble a match and needle. Repeat after me, please."

The class rumbled quietly as students murmured the phrase under their breaths. Professor McGonagall nodded, apparently finding the half-hearted attempt sufficient, and did not call on them to say it again.

She waved her wand in a sweeping motion. A drawer in her desk opened with a bang, and flurry of matches leapt out and distributed themselves among the students.

McGonagall held up one match for demonstration. "As you may have guessed, you will be practising the transformation from match to needle. The incantation for general transformation is _'Muto.'_ The wand movement follows the alphabet."

She flicked her wand up, to the side, and then down, as if joining the two letters, and the match grew silvery and pointed in her hand. She set down her needle and nodded for everyone to begin.

The classroom erupted into motion as students reached for their wands and began wave them fervently over their matches. Harry considered his match for a moment, practised the square wand movement several times—it felt stiff and unnatural to somebody accustomed to the generous, diagonal flicks and slashes characteristic of charms—and then tried the spell.

Absolutely nothing happened, but he had hardly expected otherwise. He tried twice more before pausing to consider what he was doing wrong. Next to him, Hermione had not yet picked up her wand, but appeared to be observing everyone else.

A clever tactic. Harry copied her. Nobody had yet made any indication of success, but most people seemed to have gone with the strategy of trying the spell repeatedly. Harry spotted Terry sketching squares in the air like a maniac. Some students were using grotesquely incorrect wand motions, and Professor McGonagall was making her way around the classroom, correcting the most egregious cases.

Finally, Hermione tried the spell. For a moment, the match seemed to shudder, before settling firmly back into its original shape. This effect was still more than anybody else had managed.

"How did you do that?" Harry asked.

"It's what Professor McGonagall said," she said. "You have to understand the initial and final forms, and the process. Well the match is right in front of us and everybody knows what a needle looks like, so those can't be the problem. It's the process, of course. How is the match really _becoming_ the needle?"

"Right, how?" Harry prompted, when Hermione paused. She seemed more than pleased to tell him.

"There's no logical in-between state. The match is wood and phosphorus and the needle is steel. You'll confuse yourself if you think of it like that. The trick is to rely completely on the shape of the letters. It's explained in chapter two of the textbook," she said.

Harry frowned. If it was in the textbook and directly relevant to the lesson, why had Professor McGonagall failed to mention it? Well, he supposed she had alluded to the idea, but not made it explicitly clear.

He tried the spell again, and to his gratification, the match was replaced by a needle for a split second before it returned to being a match.

"How did you do that?" Hermione demanded.

"I did what you said," he said, a little bemused. The trouble, he reckoned, was that he had spent too much effort thinking about the process this time, and not enough about the result.

Putting in the right amount of concentration turned out to be more difficult than it sounded, however, because by the end of the lesson, he had still not made it past the flickering stage. On the other hand, Morag's match, fortunately on the other side of the room, had caught fire. Twice.

Hermione's match had turned silver and pointed, and remained that way. There was no eyehole, Harry noted pettily, but Professor McGonagall gave five points to Gryffindor and exempted her from the homework that everybody else got.

"Twelve inches! It's not fair," Terry said when they had passed well out of earshot of the Gryffindors. "I almost got mine to work. McGonagall just wasn't looking. You saw it, right?"

"Oh stuff it. It's totally fair," said Anthony. "Yours barely went silver, for one second."

"I don't like it," Terry stressed. Anthony crossed his arms.

"I don't like it either, but that doesn't mean it's not fair. They're not related things at all," he said.

"They are," said Terry. "How are we supposed to judge fairness if it isn't about who likes what? There's not some objective kind of goodness. If I managed one second of the transformation, I ought to get an inch off the requirement."

Anthony snorted in disgust.

"Homework's good for you," said Stephen as he strode ahead of the bickering pair. The Ravenclaw knocker was apparently so pleased by their discussion that it let them in without asking them a question.

Actually, the door to the common room had been opened from the inside by an exiting student. It was Cho, laden with a heavy bookbag and clearly on the way to class. She waved at Harry as he passed, and he waved back, but she had already looked away.

Harry brought his Transfiguration textbook to History of Magic, and wrote his homework instead of listening to Professor Binns' impossibly soporific rambling on goblins. Hermione, who again sat at the edge of the unofficial divide between Ravenclaw and Gryffindor, actually had the gall to glare disapprovingly at him. On her other side, the rude redhead who had ridden on the train with them, Ron, was fast asleep and drooling onto his desk, and most of the other Gryffindors appeared to be faring no better. Harry wondered how on earth Hermione had not ended up in Ravenclaw.

In the second chapter of the Transfiguration text, Harry found the passage she had mentioned during the lesson that morning, on visualising the transformation process using the alphabet. He determined that his problem with the spell was at the point of moving from the letter "N" to the actual concept of a needle. He just was not sufficiently accustomed to the transfiguration alphabet. Writing down his understanding of the spell fortunately made just twelve inches, measured approximately by his wand, which he knew was eleven inches.

He glanced up at Professor Binns and noted that he was still talking about goblins, and did not look anywhere on the verge of wrapping up the lesson. Begrudgingly, he started writing out the list of words Professor McGonagall had also assigned them. It was slow going, and he had to reference the book for every other letter. Still, if Hermione, a mudblood—"muggle-born," he reminded himself—had managed to learn it so quickly, then surely he could as well. He could just imagine Petri making a scornful comparison over his shoulder.

He finished just as the period ended, and decided to spend the remainder of the afternoon in the library. Half his Ravenclaw compatriots, along with Hermione, apparently had the same idea.

"Did you finish the Transfiguration homework already?" Harry asked Hermione. "I mean, you still had to do the alphabet part, right?"

Hermione nodded. "I had a free period right after the lesson."

So had Harry, but he had spent it in the much more enjoyable pursuit of singeing his eyebrows with Exploding Snap. Oliver had conveniently interrogated Terry in detail about the rules beforehand, saving Harry the embarrassment of revealing his ignorance about wizarding games.

"Can we compare answers?" Harry asked. "I wasn't sure about the shape for 'button.'"

Hermione looked conflicted for a moment, glancing back and forth, but then nodded slightly. Harry supposed she was trying to be discreet, and didn't want everybody else to copy their answers. He could relate to that feeling; Dudley had gone through a phase of rampant copying before he had devolved to ignoring homework entirely.

The librarian stared their group down as they entered, and Lisa steered them out of her sight, to a table behind the Divination shelves, where everyone pulled up chairs and let their bookbags fall.

Nobody else had done their Transfiguration homework yet, so Harry and Hermione huddled in a corner and compared papers. Harry had written "button" in a rectangle, while Hermione had used a hexagon. After some debating Harry changed his answer. Then they were done. Harry wondered if it would be rude to return to the common room without the others.

Hermione made no indication that she was about to leave, and instead selected what appeared to be a random book off a nearby shelf to read. Harry supposed that since he was in the library already he might as well see what was available. Ninety percent of Petri's books were far beyond his comprehension, not that that stopped Petri from making him read them, but the Hogwarts library was intended for students, so he expected to have better luck.

Most of the shelf at eye level was dominated by copies of the same book: _Unfogging the Future_ , Vol. 1, by Cassandra Vablatsky. Harry supposed it must be a popular text, or required reading. He extracted a copy of the heavy, leather-bound tome and settled down across from Hermione.

The table of contents named what appeared to be every sort of "-mancy" that could be conceived of. Harry even saw "Necromancy" towards the end. He flipped to the indicated page, curious.

"Necromancy is the art of divining the future through the artifacts of the dead. The practice of necromancy dates back millennia, perhaps as far as the beginning of wizard-kind, and exists in every wizarding society. The earliest concrete description of the art mentioned in written record is found in the scrolls of the Han Court Augurs, who outline the methods of practitioners from the Shang Dynasty, thousands of years before them.

"In modern times, necromancy is a highly restricted art in most jurisdictions, due to the sensitive nature of the required materials. There is nonetheless ample opportunity and reason to practice it within these restrictions. Necromancy has long been known as as one of the most accurate forms of divination in certain contexts, outperforming even Arithmancy, for example, in the prediction of cataclysmic events surrounding single persons (for a discussion of Arithmantic accuracy in predicting mass phenomena, see Vol. 2, Chapter 8 of this series)."

Harry flipped through the next several pages and found some suggested exercises with different mediums, such as fire-reading of burning hair, or water-reading involving a treasured piece of jewellery. There was no mention of anything involving blood, bone, more substantial parts of the corpse, or even ashes. He supposed that these were considered dark magic.

He had not actually realised until now that it was even possible to do necromancy with things as innocuous as hair or personal belongings, and resolved to try it. Except, now that he thought about it, getting a dead person's hair was perhaps not as easy as it sounded at first. It was not as if there were a Rosenkol here to rob graves at will. And getting a specific dead person's hair would be even more difficult.

And anyway, what he really ought to be trying, at the moment, was the match to needle transfiguration. He eyed the other Ravenclaws and Hermione, but they were all still engrossed in their assignments and reading. Finally, he decided to stand casually and, while returning his book to the shelf, surreptitiously slip away.

Lisa noticed, but she only looked up to wave at him, and Harry waved awkwardly back. He hurried to get out from under the librarian's gaze and made for the Transfiguration classroom to find a match.

The door was locked, which Harry supposed made sense, and when he gave it an experimental tug, the rattling thud confirmed that it was bolted and barred, which prevented the use of the unlocking charm.

Just as he was considering his other options, however, the door clicked and swung open, and a stream of students began to pour out.

Of course, Harry thought, feeling rather stupid; there were other Transfiguration lessons besides his own, seven years worth. Though it looked like these were the other first years: the Hufflepuffs and Slytherins. Harry spotted Draco and his bookends stalking out towards the end. He looked quite smug, and Harry saw him twirling a little needle in his fingers.

"You got the transfiguration?" Harry blurted as they passed, and Draco paused to nod magnanimously, showing only a brief moment of surprise.

"I did," he said, and then his gaze travelled down to Harry's tie. He took another moment to glance around, before remarking "You're not in this class, are you?"

"No," said Harry. "I had it earlier. I just wanted to see if I could get a match to practise on."

To his surprise, Draco's arm shot out, offering him the transfigured needle.

"Here. I expect it will wear off any minute now."

Just as Harry's fingers closed around the needle and he stammered his thanks, Vince said, "But Draco, you said..."

"Right, right. You and..." Draco gave Harry a long moment of blank consideration before managing, "Harry, here, can practise together. We'll see you at dinner."

Then he turned on his heel and walked off without another word, his other friend lumbering after him with a confused backwards glance.

Harry had the distinct feeling that Draco had just purposefully taken the opportunity to offload his friend onto him.

"Vince, right?" Harry tried. "I'm Harry."

Vince nodded. They shook, and his gigantic, meaty paw enveloped Harry's hand entirely. Harry pulled back as soon as he could and wiped his sweaty fingers gingerly on his robes.

"Let's find an empty classroom," he suggested. The needle was still very much a needle in his hand, and felt solidly metallic. Envy of Draco Malfoy tasted rank, and he tried to swallow it down. If he was leagues ahead in Charms, it stood to reason that others could have had a head start in another subject.

Vince followed two paces behind him as if he were Draco Malfoy, and did not speak. Finding an empty classroom was harder than it sounded, since it seemed everybody had had the idea already. They stumbled across a dozen older students brandishing their wands, studying in solitary corners, and even playing Gobstones, before a moving staircase finally deposited them in a lesser-frequented part of the castle, in front of a doorway with no door, and only a frilly curtain of moth-eaten, burgundy lace.

The unoccupied little room behind it was panelled in a light wood, and offered a collection of chairs, but no desks. A single-paned, rectangular window at the far end let in just enough light to obviate the need for a lamp.

Harry tugged a chair to the centre of the room, wincing as it screeched against the uneven floor, and set the needle down. He knew _finite_ did not work on transfigured objects, and that there was a separate counter-spell, but he had not encountered it in his reading yet.

When he turned his attention to the needle again, however, it was no needle, but a match. Shrugging, he pointed his wand at it and cast the transfiguration. The match flickered, and then it was a needle flickering, and Harry's brow furrowed deeply with effort, but at last he could not hold the thought into his head and it slipped back into the form of a match.

"It doesn't work for me," said Vince, and he tried the spell with impeccable pronunciation and crisp wand movements and nothing happened whatsoever.

"You probably need to focus more on the process of transformation," Harry suggested. Vince gave him a blank stare. Harry wracked his brains for a better way to explain it. "Remember the transfiguration alphabet? How M goes to N like it's flipping over?"

"Alphabet?" asked Vincent, "Is that like, for reading?" And the way he said "reading" was awfully familiar in the worst way.

Harry hurried to preempt any philosophical trouble and said, firmly, "No. It's the alphabet like for spells. Magic. You know, just imagine how the match turns into a needle by flipping over."

It sounded sort of like nonsense even to himself, so he tried to demonstrate. Moving his wand in a square, he thought of the flip and the needle, N, but not N, but the hook, and a shiny silver needle complete with an eye.

He looked down and was a little astonished to see a needle, after all, lying there on the chair, bright and sharp. Vince looked as lost as ever.

"You try," said Harry, before he remembered that of course there was currently nothing to try on. He wondered if he could transfigure the needle right back, reverse the spell, by reversing the wand movement. Before he could think too hard about why it might be dangerous to attempt, he went ahead and did it.

It worked, and the transition was again a sort of seamless flicker, so that it looked as if his eyes were playing tricks on him.

Harry stepped back and gestured for Vince to have a go. The heavyset boy sketched the wand movement precisely, and without enthusiasm. Nothing happened.

"I can't do it," he repeated.

"Nonsense," said Harry, "Don't say that. You're foiling yourself. Most of my class couldn't get anything either. Only one girl managed it." Vince still looked unconvinced, so Harry tried another angle. "Writing McGonagall's essay helped, at least for me. You could try doing that first."

"I can't write," said Vince. And despite having somewhat expected to hear that, Harry still found himself appalled, and lost for words. Vince seemed to catch on to the problem, because he added, "It didn't come natural to me."

"It doesn't come naturally to anybody," said Harry. "You've got to learn it."

"It came natural to Draco," said Vince, with such conviction that Harry was a little afraid to contradict him. But of course Draco had learned to read and write like everybody else. Or not everybody else, as was quickly becoming apparent.

Were people who thought like Annette's father common? It couldn't be the case—Hogwarts professors assigned essays for homework, and there were textbooks, so literacy was obviously assumed.

"Maybe you just need to try again," Harry said, a little lamely.

"Trying something over and over again and expecting something different is mad," said Vince very sagely. That was true, Harry supposed, but in another way it also wasn't true at all and completely missed the point.

"It's not all or nothing," Harry said. "Each time you get a little bit better. It's what practice is for." But Vince's lips had curled into a stubborn grimace, and Harry knew he did not believe a word he'd said. The boy's declaration echoed in his head. Trying to continue the argument like this would help nobody.

Harry decided to let the matter drop and practised some more on the match. Just like with charms, or perhaps even more so, his ability to complete the transfiguration dramatically spiked after his first success. Vince said and did nothing, but continued to watch him. Harry felt very self-conscious, like he was showing off.

"So," he said, to fill the silence and take a break from the needle-match. "What sorts of things, er, do come naturally to you?"

"Eating," said Vince, very wistfully. Harry opened his mouth, and then closed it, and then opened it again.

"Er, right. Everyone—I mean, me too," he said. "What about, er, spells?"

Vince brightened up. "I know," he began, and then he deflated and said, "I don't know any. I can't do that spell, and I can't do the wand-lighting charm."

He was absolutely lying, and Harry guessed that he only knew the dark arts. Well, it was fair enough, he supposed. If Petri hadn't thought it worthwhile to teach him charms, all Harry would know was dark arts too, or worse, nothing at all.

But the wand-lighting charm, surely, was too simple just to be given up on? "You _can_ ," Harry murmured.

Harry thought about magic, and necessity, and the wand-lighting charm. Then he raised his wand and said, " _Nox!_ " and the room dimmed, as if some sourceless darkness were pressing upon it and draining the sunlight. According to their Defence textbook, this charm was the "wand-extinguishing charm," but Harry knew from seeing Petri use it on rooms lit by bluebell flame that it just as well extinguished any illumination, in the most peculiar fashion. It did not put out fires, but just temporarily stopped any light from escaping them.

Preventing the sunlight from showing through the window took more iterations of the spell than he had ever needed to counter _lumos_ , but eventually he managed to plunge them into darkness.

"What are you doing?" Vince demanded.

"Cast the spell," Harry said.

"What spell?" Vince sounded nervous, and Harry heard the scraping and knocking of chairs. He scrambled backwards in order to avoid being in the heavyset boy's way.

"Cast _lumos_ ," he insisted. "I know you can do it."

"I can't," Vince protested. "I told you."

"Just try it!" Harry cajoled.

" _Lumos_ ," muttered Vince, and there was the faintest sputter of light, which then disappeared.

"Come on, even a squib could do that," Harry said, and perhaps it was mean, but it was what Rosenkol had said, and enmity had ignited Harry's spellcasting as much as encouragement ever had.

" _Lumos,_ " Vince said again, and the room lightened considerably until it was back to normal, and finally a faint beam of light shot out of the end of his wand.

"Nice," said Harry, grinning with distraction. He noticed that Vince had actually begun by countering Harry's spell, rather than simply lighting his own wand, and wondered why that had happened. He was about to ask, but figured that Vince most likely didn't know either.

"Thanks," said Vince, glancing down nervously. He seemed to need a moment to compose himself, but then he looked up and smiled shyly. "It didn't make sense to me until then, but then it was just, obvious. Light in the dark. That was… it was scary, but clever of you, Harry."

He said "Harry," very naturally, Harry noticed, without skipping a beat the way Draco and Terry and very nearly everybody else did.

Harry tugged at his tie and twirled the end around his fingers. "I _am_ a Ravenclaw," he said, and they chuckled with something that was almost camaraderie.

"It's nearly dinnertime," said Vince, and even though "nearly" was stretching it, Harry decided he had accomplished what he had set out to do, and agreed to leave for the Great Hall.

There was no food yet when they arrived, but the places had been set and there were some students there already, including Draco Malfoy and his other friend. Harry handed Draco his match back, currently in the form a needle.

"You did it, then?" Draco asked, and he looked back and forth between Harry and Vince, before finally settling on Harry, who nodded.

"Not me," said Vince a little glumly, "but look. _Lumos_." A weak but steady light filtered out of the end of his wand.

Draco did not look remotely impressed, but he said anyway, "Good," and then, "Sit down." And Vince sat. Harry stood awkwardly for several more seconds before he decided to slink away to the Ravenclaw table, where some older students were studying with their books stacked high between the plates.

Before he could find a suitable place to sit down, he was accosted by a very pale and garlicky Professor Quirrell, who said, "Mr P-p-p," gave up on the name and slid into, "please come see me after, after dinner. My office. You, you re-remember where it is?"

"Yes, sir," said Harry, supposing that Professor Quirrell had finally come up with the results of his analysis. It was about time.

Harry watched him throughout dinner while shoveling potatoes impatiently into his mouth, and at the first sign of Professor Quirrell slipping delicately from his place at the high table, he vacated his seat as well and hurried to intercept the man outside.

"Let's go together, sir," he said as he caught up, and Professor Quirrell nodded jerkily, looking rather surprised. Harry was not sure why—it had been a common-sense idea. Perhaps the professor had wanted to do something beforehand? Well, he ought not to have said "after dinner," if that was the case.

"I read about the spell you used, sir," said Harry. "Is it really hard to understand the impressions? But then how does it help you control enchantments?" He had more to say, but remembered to hold his stream of questions and give Professor Quirrell some time to answer.

"It isn't, isn't hard, ordinarily," said Professor Quirrell. "But the, the vampire's c-curse is very c-complicated."

Harry nodded. He supposed something that could slowly warp a person into a magical creature with all manner of odd properties would hardly be simple. "I see. So there isn't a better way to measure how far along the curse has got? I thought, maybe, it's a common medical thing."

"Not c-common," said Professor Quirrell. "Most p-people don't survive an enc-counter with a vampire."

This entirely contradicted Harry's knowledge of vampires, and he had to protest. "I thought vampires don't kill someone on the first go. They visit a few times."

"Repeat visits that end in d-death," Quirrell averred. "C-consec-consecutive nights."

Wouldn't somebody notice by the first night that they had been attacked and take preventive measures? But then Harry remembered the memory charm, and whatever sympathetic variant wandless vampires employed, and supposed not.

"H-here we are," said Professor Quirrell as they rounded the bend of the Charm's corridor. He pulled open his office door and held it.

Harry preceded him and took one of the visitor's chairs as Professor Quirrell edged his way around his desk. The décor on the wall immediately behind the man was different from the last time he had seen it; some of the aeroplane photographs had been replaced by other clippings, these ones from some coloured wizarding magazine, judging by the prominent moving picture. It depicted what looked like a long tree branch that had a golden, obviously enchanted snake coiled around it, slithering continuously but somehow never moving an inch up the branch.

Below the picture, bold text read, "ROD OF AESCULAPIUS? Curse breakers in the Balkans discovered an artefact that resembles..."

Professor Quirrell followed the direction of his gaze and said, still staring at the picture, "They found it several days ago, and think it might have been created by Herpo the Foul."

"Sorry sir, who's that?" Harry asked. Oddly enough, Professor Quirrell's head whipped in the wrong direction at this, so that he was facing away from Harry, but not looking directly at the picture either.

"An ancient dark wizard, known for his affinity with snakes," the professor answered with his back still turned. He did not seem inclined to give any further details.

"Oh," Harry said, losing interest.

It was high time Professor Quirrell reveal what he had learned from the Evil Eye spell. That was what he had come for.

"So, about the vampire curse, what's the verdict, sir?" he asked. It was bad news; he would bet his Gringotts key on it, or there was no way it would have taken so long.

"Not g-good, I'm afraid," said Professor Quirrell, finally turning around to face him. "Very, very severe. Y-you could be on the v-verge of losing your humanity. The best solution would be to, to, defeat the vampire and end the curse."

"Defeat?" Harry repeated, putting aside for a moment the matter of imminent transformation into a dark creature in favour of an even less credible prospect. "You mean kill?" Laughable. His beating Silviu in a fight was unimaginable. But then again, Silviu seemed to have some sort of misguided soft spot for him. What if Harry caught him off guard?

It was still a stretch.

"Yes, kill," Professor Quirrell agreed, so obliviously serious that Harry had to at least entertain the notion.

"Does the killing curse work on vampires?" he wondered aloud. That he certainly could not and would not cast that curse was beside the point.

"A sufficiently powerful killing curse will work on anything," said Professor Quirrell, but he frowned as he said it, and stared darkly at at Harry, almost as if saying to himself, "anything but you." But of course, Harry knew that Professor Quirrell couldn't possibly notice that Harry had survived the killing curse without concluding something about his identity.

More likely he was alarmed at Harry's mention of the curse at all. "Oh, er, well but it's illegal. I mean, unforgivable," he said quickly.

But Professor Quirrell corrected him. "The killing curse is only unforgivable when cast on a human,"

"Oh." The world and everything in it except Harry seemed to take a twisting step to the left. He hadn't once considered that the curse could be permissible, in any context. Of course he had seen Petri cast it unflinchingly on animals before, but he'd automatically attributed it to the man's general disregard for the law.

"N-not that I'm suggesting that you learn the k-killing curse," Professor Quirrell added hastily. "B-but there are other effective curses as well."

"Like what, sir?" asked Harry, sceptical. Petri had implied that there was very little even a grown wizard could do, legally, to get out of a sticky situation with a vampire. He had not mentioned the killing curse, but Harry supposed it was a hard curse that not many people knew and that was certainly beyond Harry's ability. They had been looking for practical solutions at the time.

Also, Harry remembered, Silviu had a wand, and that changed things, but he was hardly going to mention that to the professor.

"There's the Enemy's Curse," said Professor Quirrell.

"Isn't that illegal?" Harry asked, and then considered for another moment, "or is it like the killing curse?"

"Right, exactly," Professor Quirrell confirmed, though he looked a little surprised, perhaps, that Harry had heard of it. "Only illegal on humans."

Petri had not mentioned this fact, for obvious reasons, given his stance on using curses like that, and Harry remembered that the first time he had seen it was when Annette used it on Silviu in his memory.

"Is it a standard defence against vampires, or something, sir?" he asked.

"No, not, not exactly, but it's a good opening spell, for anything," said Quirrell. "A beam spell, impossible to dodge if properly aimed."

"Beam spell?" Harry repeated. "You mean a projection spell, sir?"

"A specific sort of projection spell," said Professor Quirrell. "Perhaps a demonstration would be best. Consider the stunning spell."

He stood and stepped back, drew his wand from his sleeve with a flick of his hand, and pointed it at the wall. Harry got to his feet as well and watched with interest as the professor incanted, _"Stupefy!"_ and a bright red bolt shot out and struck the stone in between a pair of newspaper clippings, splashing against it and leaving behind a small scorch mark.

"It can be dodged," said Professor Quirrell. "It is projected, but it is not light. The spell is much slower, and glows because it is hot. Contrast to the Enemy's Curse. _Inimico!_ " His imperative was reserved, almost clinical, and a flash of radiant blue escaped the end of his wand. This time Harry bore the watering of his eyes and observed, with some wonder and horror, what the professor had been trying to explain. The spell took no time at all to reach the wall—it had simply come into existence and then faded just as instantaneously a moment later. Suddenly, it made sense, how it had "pierced" Silviu's shield charm in his memory. Any attempt to counter the curse after it had already been cast was futile, because it would already be too late. Preempting it must be the only effective measure.

Harry squinted at the scorch mark made by the stunning spell and his vision zoomed in alarmingly, his enchanted spectacles a little too eager to assist. He nearly fell over but managed to catch himself on the edge of Professor Quirrell's desk and take a proper look. Just one mark. Either the man had impeccable aim, or the Enemy's Curse had had no effect whatsoever on the wall.

"What does that curse actually do?" Harry asked, now finding it a little absurd that he had been able to cast it without even knowing any basic facts about it. He supposed he could see where Petri was coming from, just a little, on the topic of instinctive spellcasting.

"It depends," said Professor Quirrell, "on many factors. The caster's aggression, and desperation, and the target's aggression. As the name suggests, it is most effective on enemies, and simply causes indiscriminate damage throughout the body. Burst blood vessels are a common effect."

"And that affects vampires?" Harry asked, because now that he thought of it, he had no idea how vampires worked, either. Where did the blood they drank go? Was it like food for humans, or did it literally become their blood? He needed to consult the library. Or Professor Quirrell, but he didn't want to annoy the man with too many tangential questions.

"Yes," said Professor Quirrell. "As I said, the curse causes damage to the enemy, whatever it might be."

"I see, sir," said Harry.

"Good. Well then, Mr Potter, give it a try," said Professor Quirrell. "It's not difficult."

"I already know it," said Harry, after a moment's pause. There was no reason to hide the fact now.

"Then show me," the professor amended. Harry hesitated. He wasn't sure exactly how to articulate why he did not want to cast the spell without sounding like he had been lying, somehow.

"Are you sure?" he asked instead, to buy some thinking time. But Professor Quirrell was very sure, and only nodded sternly.

It was fine to cast it for an academic purpose, was it not? It apparently wasn't illegal after all. And it wasn't like just using it was going to turn Harry into a vegetable, or—his mind flashed to Crabbe, and he winced at the uncharitable thought, but it was true. He knew not to rely on the curse in real situations.

Steeling himself, he drew his wand and pointed it in the approximate direction of the mark left by the professor's stunning spell. He breathed in, and focused on the spell. " _Inimico!_ "

He felt his stomach drop like a large stone had fell into it as nothing happened. "Er..."

Harry peered up at Professor Quirrell through his fringe and noticed with surprise that the man's eyes were wide and unfocused, and that a sheen of sweat had appeared across his narrow forehead. He looked like he was about to be ill.

"Ah, Mr P-p-potter," the professor stammered, not just normally, but like he was very nervous. Harry blinked, because he couldn't remember Professor Quirrell stuttering just a minute ago. He had spoken quite confidently, then. "Think, think of s-someone you d-don't like."

Right, of course. That was the point, he understood, with sudden clarity. The Enemy's Curse was for enemies. It wasn't like the mending charm or the fire-making charm or even the killing curse. All those were defined by their effects. This curse was defined by its target.

He thought of Petri, but with the man so far away, he couldn't muster up even resentment. Actually, he had a thousand questions for the man, questions he could have asked with impunity had he been there instead of here.

His mind flashed to Silviu next. Silviu had just about turned him into a vampire, and he was supposed to be practicing this spell to kill him, as stupid as it sounded even in Harry's head. But something about Silviu made it impossible to hate him too, even if Harry trusted him about as far as he could throw him. Maybe it was his sheer earnestness, which made him seem almost simple. It was like trying to hate a cat for biting your hand.

What was hatred, or even dislike? Funny. The spell had come so easily to him the first time, erupted so smoothly from his wand that he had been confident that he'd all but mastered it. He passed his wand to his other hand so he could wipe his sweaty palm on his robes. Now he was left bereft of the faintest idea of how to summon the requisite magic.

Professor Quirrell still looked as nervous as Harry felt, which paradoxically served to calm him.

"I don't think I can, er, with no target," he admitted, rolling his wand slowly between his palms. "I've only done it once before and it was, er, different."

The imminent threat of the cruciatus curse had probably been a key motivator, now that he thought on it.

"Im-imagination," Professor Quirrell stammered, almost at a whisper. Harry blinked at the cryptic comment. Was he saying that Harry needed more imagination?

Meanwhile, Professor Quirrell stopped looking quite as ill and had begun, instead, to stare off into space in the vague direction of the back corner.

Before Harry could think of how to articulate that imagination was not the issue here, the professor nodded to himself and said, "Perhaps that's enough. We c-can continue a-another time. It's nearly c-curfew."

Startled, Harry flicked his wand and confirmed that the time was indeed quarter to curfew.

"Er, right, sir," he said. "Thanks for, er, thanks." Since Professor Quirrell did not seem to paying all that much attention, he shoved his wand in his robe pocket, backed up to the door, and leaned his weight against it so that he rotated along with it out of the office.

He felt suddenly drained, and his feet dragged despite his need to make it back to the Ravenclaw common room before curfew. Why hadn't he been able to cast the spell? He twirled his wand absently between his fingers, as if he might divine the answer in its striated surface, but it felt like only so much dead wood in his hands.


	25. Anonymous

Friday they only had potions, in the afternoon. Accordingly, Harry spent the morning holed up behind his bed curtains, consulting Nic's book and trying to apply his newly acquired knowledge of Transfiguration to understanding the passages on sympathetic magic. He couldn't help thinking that, short of killing Silviu as Professor Quirrell had unrealistically suggested, the best first step in dealing with the vampire's curse was to get a better understanding of how it worked.

Not that the book on the Philosopher's Stone was much help on that front. Even with Nic's directions and notes, it was unclear how a wizard was actually supposed to understand sympathetic magic. Believing in reality and desiring the truth was all good—too good. Harry didn't see why anybody would willingly believe in falsities, or desire lies. Yet it was clear that he was not currently in the state described in the book, because otherwise he would not be having these troubles with sympathetic magic in the first place.

He was disturbed from his agonizing and contemplation by a disturbance in his curtains. The dark blue material suddenly jumped at him, billowing with a dull sound. Somebody was… knocking.

Harry ripped the hangings to the side, and for his trouble nearly got a fist to his face.

"Oi, watch it."

"You're awake!" Terry exclaimed. Harry scowled.

"Of course I'm awake. It's bloody," he paused, checked the time with his wand, and continued, "eleven o'clock. I was reading."

As surreptitiously as he could, he shoved his book closed and laid his hand over the front to obscure the title.

"Sorry," said Terry. "You didn't come to breakfast so me and Anthony thought you were having a lie-in. Wanted to make sure you didn't miss Potions."

"Thanks," said Harry, charitably not pointing out that they did not have Potions until after lunch, and as such he still had over an hour to spare. He understood the origin of the sentiment.

Upon hearing that their first contact with the man was to be postponed the better part of a week, Robert had wasted no time regaling any firstie he stumbled across with horror stories about Professor Snape, the Potions Master. A good two-thirds of these tales seemed to be second-hand accounts involving Gryffindors, but they were worrying all the same.

Professor Snape was known for calling on students at will during his lecture, whether or not they raised a hand to volunteer, and belittling anybody who failed to deliver a correct and concise response. He also blatantly favoured his own house with points, and seemed to take the Slytherin-Gryffindor rivalry more seriously than even the students. Once, a disastrous review session had ended with only a single ruby left in the towering Gryffindor hourglass, all without any potions even being brewed. As it transpired, it was not possible for a house to have negative points. Fortunately, Ravenclaws were not Gryffindors, but the point still stood.

Practicals were supposedly even worse. Professor Snape had the eyes and ears of a hawk; nothing escaped him in his classroom. He also believed in truly practical learning, and rarely intervened in potions accidents unless they appeared imminently life-threatening. Potions lessons were by far at the top of the list of reasons for visiting the hospital wing.

It was with all this in mind that a subdued group of Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs waited with bated breath in the chilly dungeon classroom for the arrival of their professor. It was still five minutes to the lesson, but all the students were already present. Harry had somehow managed to be the odd one out again, and had been relegated to a seat adjacent to a Hufflepuff girl who looked like she was about to be sick at any moment.

At precisely twelve thirty, the door to the classroom burst open and Professor Snape stalked in, black robes billowing behind him. He strode with single-minded purpose to his desk, stepped up behind the raised lectern, and pivoted crisply.

"We shall make this quick," he began, unfurling the scroll of names. "A raised hand will suffice to note your presence. Abbott, Hannah."

The girl beside him squeaked at her name being called, as if she hadn't had her whole life to become accustomed to alphabetical order, and raised a shy hand. Professor Snape's eyes flickered briefly upward before he continued.

When he got to "Potter, Harry," some intense emotion flashed across the Professor's face, only to be replaced the next moment by apparent bewilderment, and then a sneer of consternation. He paused a little longer than he had after the other names, before proceeding.

As soon as he finished taking the register, his dark gaze swept over entire class, searching. They made a full circuit around the room and seemed still to be left wanting. Then he spoke: "Potion-making is the most versatile and exact practice that you all will encounter in your lives. There is little fanciful incanting or foolish wand-waving to be found here. As such, many of you will hardly comprehend the magic that lies within the softly simmering cauldron, the subtle and beautiful power that can bewitch the mind and ensnare the senses. But you will learn. I shall teach you to capture the most ephemeral forces in a bottle—fame, fortune, even life and death—unless you prove yourselves to be another bunch of lazy, disgraceful dunderheads."

He stopped for a moment, and there was a rustling across the classroom from the flattening of unruly parchment rolls. Harry gripped his quill tightly and readied himself to make notes.

"Potter!" Professor Snape said suddenly, and Harry jumped. The Professor was glaring intently at the register that still rested on his lectern. "Tell me. What would I get if I added armadillo bile and ground scarab beetles to a tincture of ginger?"

Harry, accustomed to being forced to answer barked questions on the spot, wasted no more time with surprise and instead spent a moment to contemplate. The word "tincture" rang a bell. For each common type of potion base, the Potions text, which he had pored over during lunch, had given an example of something that used it. Harry wasn't sure he remembered the particular ingredients, but he couldn't imagine that Professor Snape would expect them to know some random potion, otherwise.

So he said, confidently, "Wit-Sharpening Potion."

Professor Snape's head snapped up and he looked wildly around the classroom. Frustration curled his lip, before his expression blanked. "Correct," he said. "MacMillan! What is the difference between an elixir and a liqueur?"

"Er," said a sandy-haired Hufflepuff boy two desks down from Harry, presumably MacMillan. "One of them has alcohol, sir?"

Harry winced a little on the boy's behalf as Professor Snape sneered darkly. "One of them? Which one?"

"The-the liqueur?" MacMillan attempted most courageously.

Professor Snape smiled, not showing his teeth. It was the same sort of schadenfreude-filled curl of the lip that Petri favoured.

"Yes, how very astute. A liqueur contains alcohol," he said slowly. MacMillan cringed backward, sinking in his seat until his chin was near level with his stone desk. Professor Snape continued. "More precisely, it is an alcohol base featuring extracts of fruits or nuts. An elixir is _also_ an alcohol base, in which a powdered ingredient has been dissolved, commonly cane sugar or quartz."

Harry scribbled down "elixir, sugar or quartz." He vaguely recalled reading something about quartz in the book about duplication that Petri had showed him, but he didn't think it had been mentioned in his school text.

"Let's try again," said Professor Snape. "MacMillan, how many times should snake fangs be folded into a potion for a salutary effect?"

MacMillan didn't know this one either. He also didn't look like he knew what "salutary" even meant—neither did Harry, who wrote it down for later. Mercifully, Professor Snape looked to the rest of the students and said, "Well?"

Hesitantly, Terry raised his hand.

"Boot," said Professor Snape promptly.

"Sir, an odd number of times," said Terry. Professor Snape gave a curt nod.

"Mr Boot is correct. Any odd number of foldings is beneficial, while an even number is deleterious. You'd do best to remember that, as you will be working with snake fangs shortly." He waved his wand, and chalk writing appeared on the blackboard in a slanted scrawl. It appeared to be a recipe. "You will be preparing a cure for boils today. Each of you will be brewing your own potion. The special ingredients are in the storage cabinets to my right."

Professor Snape gestured to the cabinets, before letting his arm fall limply to his side. There was a moment of stillness, and then at once all the students seemed to surge to their feet and make a mad rush for the ingredients. Harry saw the professor rub tiredly at his temples.

"In an orderly fashion, if you would," said Professor Snape stonily. Miraculously, his low voice cut through the din and everyone slowed and shuffled into a haphazard queue.

Harry found himself towards the back, but this gave him the leisure to watch the first students as they began their potions. There was some confusion over the heating element—apparently, a disc of stone at the top corners of each of their desks would make a flame when prodded with a wand, and could be adjusted to three different settings with further wand taps.

There was a plethora of other tools as well. A round jug with a thin spout, shared between each pair of students, could produce arbitrary amounts of pure water, and in the drawers of each desk were a large assortment of stirring rods, scoops, and ladles in varying sizes. The cauldrons, scales, and certain common ingredients, as had been detailed on the list that came with the Hogwarts acceptance letter, were to be supplied by the student.

Harry finally came to the front of the queue and, having seen a dozen others before him, was able to gather his snake fangs, horned slugs, and porcupine quills with alacrity and return to his place.

He ducked under the table to retrieve his cauldron, dumping out the books and parchments he had carried inside. Then he placed it on the heating disc and proceeded to fill halfway with water and set it to boil. There was a charm to boil water almost instantly, he knew, that Petri used all the time for his tea, but he couldn't yet cast it and wasn't sure if it was safe to use while making potions, anyway. Surely there was some magical reason behind the need to heat, measure, and stir manually, rather than with "foolish wand-waving."

Harry proceeded to rummage about in the drawer to produce a stirring rod, a small stone spoon, and a mortar and pestle. Spying Hannah approaching, he charitably withdrew a second set of implements and set them on her side of the table.

"Thanks," she said, smiling at him wanly with her face half-hidden behind a curtain of hair.

"No problem," said Harry. He squinted at the instructions on the board to make sure he had got everything right, his spectacles helpfully magnifying everything he concentrated on, and then set to work.

It really was not particularly complicated, which was reassuring, given that it was their first-ever potion. The base was pure water, boiling, and the first ingredient was crushed snake fangs. Four measures were required, but they were added all at once. Harry supposed adding them separately would count as an even folding, and result in some bad effect.

The mortar and pestle took some getting used to. Harry took his time crushing the fangs to a fine powder. He glanced at Hannah and saw that she was preparing to scoop hers into her cauldron.

"You have to add it all at once," he whispered urgently. Hannah glanced over to him in bewilderment. "The snake fangs," he said. "All four measures at the same time or it would be even, not odd, like the professor said."

Harry measured the powder carefully, using a stirring rod to level it off, and held it in a second bowl. Then he dumped all of it into the cauldron and waited for it to settle, as he noticed no instruction for stirring.

He turned the fire up to the maximum setting and counted ten seconds with his wand, waiting for the water to turn clear and reddish. Then he lowered the heat again and waved his wand at the cauldron, feeling rather foolish as nothing appeared to happen. Somewhat frantically, he picked up his potions text from where it lay beside his feet and flipped it to the index, and then to the instructions for the Boil Cure. The entry was absolutely no help, and had even less detail than what Professor Snape had written on the board.

He bit his lip, considered raising his hand, and then thought better of it and looked around at the other students for inspiration. Most were at a similar stage to him, though some were still crushing their fangs.

His eyes wandered to the left and settled on Stephen, who looked like he knew what he was doing. He had sat back and was staring absently into space, his cauldron already at a low simmer and emitting the proper red fumes. Harry's steam was still clear.

Suddenly inspired by the thought, he extended his arm and waved his wand in the midst of the steam cloud, just above the cauldron's surface. It darkened instantly, and Harry grinned to himself, setting his wand down. The next thing was to wait for at least thirty minutes, which did not seem very exciting.

After about five minutes, Professor Snape finished making a circuit of the classroom and returned to his desk. He cleared his throat.

"Has anybody yet to reach the simmering stage?" he asked. Nobody spoke up, even as his tunnel-like eyes bored through the rising steam and scrutinised each and every cauldron. There were definitely some plumes of clear, or even green smoke mingling with the red.

"Some of you may be wondering how you could have already gone wrong adding a single ingredient to water. Rest assured that I am wondering the same thing," he murmured. "MacMillan!"

The unfortunate MacMillan jumped guiltily amid a cloud of green.

"Tell me. What potion are you brewing?" asked Professor Snape.

"Er, Boil Cure, sir," said MacMillan haplessly. Harry could feel the miasma of the professor's sneer from across the classroom.

"No, Mr MacMillan, try again. What colour is it supposed it be?" Professor Snape indicated the blackboard with a jerk of his head.

"Red, sir," said MacMillan. "Mine is green," he added, before he was inevitably prompted and made a fool of.

"How many times," said Professor Snape, "should snake fangs be folded into this potion?"

To his credit, MacMillan was relatively quick on the uptake here. "Once, sir. An odd number."

With that, Professor Snape ceased to acknowledge him and turned back to the class at large.

"When exposed to high heat, crushed snake fangs will fuse into a syrup that serves as this potion's base. An odd folding of snake fangs will result in a curative potion, while an even number results in the opposite—a boil inducer. Why should the parity of the folding matter?"

Professor Snape waited, but did not address his question to any particular student. After a few moments, Stephen raised his hand.

"Mr Cornfoot."

"Snake fangs have a cancelling effect. When you add them twice you sort of, cancel the cancelling," said Stephen.

"That is correct," said Professor Snape. "A point to Ravenclaw. You will encounter a variety of ingredients that function in a similar way. These ingredients are known as reverse amplifiers. It is vital to understand the difference between an amplifier and a reverse amplifier, as an error could result in poison rather than cure, or any manner of explosive or transformative results."

Professor Snape spent the rest of the thirty minute wait time lecturing about just that topic. Harry started out taking some notes, but quickly gave up in favour of simply paying attention. He wished he had his remembrall, and resolved to bring it to all his lessons in the future.

It was apparently difficult to tell just by looking whether a given ingredient was a regular or reverse amplifier, but in the context of an existing recipe, the preparation method was a good hint. Reverse amplifiers were almost always powdered, juiced, or crushed, and never added whole, in order to prevent a disastrous time delay between some portion of the ingredient and the rest taking effect. Amplifiers, on the other hand, were usually expected to continue acting in the potion for the duration of the brewing process.

Professor Snape made a list of common amplifiers and reverse amplifiers, implied that they would need to have it memorised post haste, and assigned them ten inches on a reverse amplifier of their choice. Then it was time for the second stage of the potion.

"Your potion should now resemble a light-coloured treacle. If it appears too watery, you may add a dash of flobberworm mucus to thicken it," said Professor Snape.

Harry wasn't sure what the likes of MacMillan, who had completely botched the first part, were meant to do, as Snape did not provide any additional instruction, and he was glad that he had managed everything successfully so far.

The concoction in his cauldron had condensed into a translucent, reddish syrup. Harry grasped the cauldron by its handle and tilted it left and right. The potion slid reluctantly along, clinging to the sides, and seemed more or less the correct consistency. He added four horned slugs, whole, grimacing at the slime they left behind on his hands, and prodded gently at the potion with his stirring rod until their jelly-like bodies dissolved into the goop.

"REMOVE CAULDRON FROM FIRE," said the next line, in blocky capital letters, noticeably larger text than the rest of the instructions.

Harry duly removed his cauldron from the fire, and waited a minute for it to cool, for good measure, before he added two porcupine quills. They remained floating at the top, suspended, and did not appear to have any effect. Harry took a stirring rod and prodded them doubtfully, sinking them slightly deeper.

Glancing up at the instructions, he traded out the stirring stick for his wand. The potion turned opaque and lightened to pink, but he could still see part of a porcupine quill sticking out.

He glanced over to Stephen, who was predictably finished and had scooped his potion into a glass jar. Harry copied him, leaving out the whole quills. There was still enough in the cauldron to fill at least another jar, so he did so, figuring that a boil curing paste could come in handy.

Five minutes later, Professor Snape told everyone to bottle what they had and place it on his desk, labelled with their names. Harry set his down in the middle of the collection, and paused to eye the rest. Most were similarly creamy and opaque, but in various shades of pink. There were a couple dark sludges, and some distinctly soupy specimens. Harry decided that he had probably done all right.

"It's officially the weekend!" Terry declared cheerily as they poured out of the Potions classroom.

"Yeah, and Snape wasn't even that bad," said Harry. He had been a bit intimidating, but certainly not to the level of Robert's tall tales. Terry groaned.

"Says you. My potion turned into a rock and he called me a nitwit," he complained.

"How'd that happen?" asked Lisa. Terry just groaned again. "Academic curiosity, come on," Lisa cajoled.

"Too much flobberworm mucus," Terry finally admitted.

"Really?" Academic curiosity or not, Lisa laughed at him and he scowled deeply.

"Whatever. What are you guys planning to do?" he asked.

"Homework," said Stephen. "You know, like the homework Professor Snape's just assigned."

Before Terry could get properly outraged, Harry held up his cauldron full of books, ingredients, and extra boil-cure and said, "I'm going back to the common room to drop off my stuff."

"Good idea," said Lisa, charging ahead to lead the way.

When they arrived at the dormitories, Harry shoved his cauldron underneath his bed and reached behind the hangings to slide the philosopher's stone book after it. The book was just beyond him, at least for now. Maybe there were books in the library that could explain sympathetic magic in a less cryptic way. There would certainly be books on vampires, at least.

"I'm heading to the library," said Stephen to the room at large, true to his word.

"Wait for me," said Harry. He reached into his pockets to make sure that his note parchment and quills were still there before hurrying to the door, which Stephen was propping open with his foot.

"I don't think anybody else is coming," Stephen said. Harry glanced behind him and came to the same conclusion. Terry and Anthony had set up for wizard's chess again, while Oliver was sitting on his bed, already engrossed in a book.

"Right, let's go then," Harry agreed.

They walked in silence for some time, stepping carefully down the cramped tower staircase, before Harry's curiosity got the better him.

"So have you brewed a potion before? I mean, before today. You seemed to, er, know what you were doing," he asked.

Stephen nodded up ahead. "Yes, loads of times. My mother does potions research and she lets me help sometimes, you know. There's this book she has, about ingredients. Not like our Herbology text—it's organised by type, like amplifiers and disrupters, and balancers and whatnot. That's what I'm going to the library for. I mean I'm sure they have it. I'll show you."

"Sounds brilliant," said Harry. "I don't really know much about potions. Just what we've done so far. Professor Snape seems to know his stuff."

"Professor Snape's a genius. He's the youngest MESP member ever, you know. That's the official potioneers' guild. We're really lucky to get to learn from him. Did you know he doesn't take apprentices, and a lot of people are annoyed at that, but I mean he teaches all us Hogwarts students so that's even better, I think."

Harry hadn't known all of that, but he just nodded, and then remembered that Stephen couldn't see him and hurried to catch up as they finally emerged into the common room proper.

"I suppose," said Harry. "I wish he'd explained a bit more before we started the potion. There's still some things I'm not sure about. Everyone's potions, I mean, everyone who got all the instructions right, were still different shades of pink. Does that matter?"

"Yes," said Stephen. "The lighter the colour, the stronger the boil cure is, but it also doesn't last as long. I mean it goes bad faster, so you have to balance it. The trick is with the porcupine quills. It's best to break them up and sort of distribute them a bit, before accelerating the potion. Not exactly sure why, but I think it's got to do with how long their effect lasts."

"Accelerating?" Harry asked. "Like when you wave your wand at the end?"

"Yes, that's to make the non-magical ingredients combine. I mean in theory if you waited, like, forever, I suppose things would combine on their own, but I bet all the magic in the potion would be gone by then anyway. So you need to add more magic to speed it up," Stephen explained.

"Really? Does it say that in the textbook? I don't remember reading that anywhere," said Harry.

"It's true," said Stephen, a little defensively.

"Yeah, but why doesn't the book just _say_ so?" was what Harry wanted to know.

"My sister says the texts for the first few years just talk about what you need to do, and not really how it works. Otherwise they'd be like, huge tomes. I mean, not everybody's a Ravenclaw and wants to spend all eternity reading, you know?" said Stephen. "That's what the library is for."

"I suppose," said Harry. "Wait, I thought the library was upstairs?" They had been moving steadily downward for far longer than seemed right, and Harry had been too focused on the conversation to pay much attention to where Stephen had been leading them.

"It's better to go in the entrance down there," Stephen said, pointing down to the left, past a gap in their landing that was waiting for a moving stair to come by. Harry thought he recognised the Transfiguration corridor just below that, so they must have been on the second floor. "That way Madam Pince doesn't stare you down as soon as you walk in."

Madam Pince, Harry supposed, was the unpleasant-looking librarian.

"I might need to talk to her," Harry admitted. "I'm looking for some books and I have no idea where they'd be."

"She's totally unhelpful," said Stephen. "She'll probably just yell at you. What books are you looking for?"

"Er, something on sympathetic magic," said Harry.

"Like magic with emotions?" asked Stephen. "Love potions?"

"Er, no, not like that," said Harry hurriedly. "It's just called sympathetic magic. I don't really know what it is; I just heard it somewhere. So that's why I'm looking for a book on it."

Stephen shrugged. "Never heard of it. Maybe you can just look around the shelves. I still wouldn't try your luck with Pince."

"She can't be that bad," said Harry, but Stephen only gave him a measured look, so he said, "Is there some kind of card catalogue?"

"Card what?" asked Stephen.

"Like something that says where each book is," Harry said.

"Oh, a book of books," said Stephen. "I don't know. If there is, Madam Pince probably has it."

Harry sighed.

The correct moving staircase finally deigned to grind to a shuddering stop before their position, and they hurried down it, over a trick stair that Stephen helpfully pointed out ("My sister's got this list of all the trick stairs in Hogwarts. She wrote a poem to help remember. I'll show you."), and turned the corner to find themselves in front of a small stone archway with a portcullis-like metal grille raised above it.

There was no sign, but it was pretty obvious by the view beyond that they had indeed reached the library.

Stephen made a beeline for the Potions section, and Harry hesitantly ascended the right staircase to the second level, where Madam Pince's desk was located.

"Excuse me," he said, approaching the counter. Madam Pince adjusted her ridiculous hat, which looked like a half-plucked bird carcass, and peered at him suspiciously from beneath its dark green brim.

"Yes, what are you looking for, boy?" she asked.

"Er, a book," Harry said, most redundantly, "something on, er, sympathetic magic."

"And you have a note from a teacher?" she pressed.

Harry, who had no such thing, said, "Oh, er, I didn't know you needed a note."

"Students aren't to get anything out of the Restricted Section without a note," said Madam Pince accusingly, her eyes narrowing to slits.

"Restricted Section?" Harry repeated. "I didn't..." he wisely stopped before he could talk himself into further trouble. Hadn't Professor Quirrell mentioned that the book from Nic was on dark magic? He should have known.

"That's right you didn't. Well, what are you still doing here?" Madam Pince demanded after a few seconds of silence.

"I, er, do you have books on vampires?" Harry tried instead, hoping that this wasn't something else restricted, though he couldn't imagine why it would be.

"Defence Against the Dark Arts and Magical Creatures sections," said Madam Pince.

Harry could have guessed this for himself. "Where exactly..."

"There and there." Madam Pince indicated the direction with a sharp jab of her wand, and Harry flinched back on reflex.

"Thanks," he said, declining to ask for further detail. He saw exactly now what Stephen had meant by, "unhelpful."

Madam Pince had pointed in the general direction of the opposite side of the library on the same floor, and at the first floor. Harry elected to return downstairs and perhaps find Stephen again. His housemate was nowhere in sight when he reached the bottom, but the shelves on magical creatures were indeed directly across the room.

Unfortunately, the section spanned at least a dozen shelves, and Harry couldn't begin to guess which author he might be looking for.

As it turned out, however, the books were clearly not organised by author, but continued to be grouped by subject, so Harry supposed he could browse along the spines until he saw the word "vampire" somewhere.

He went through four rows of shelves and was considering doubling back in case he had missed something, when he finally found what he was looking for—titles like _Notable Vampires of the Sixteenth Century,_ _Visiting with Vampires,_ and _Vampire Vision_ were suddenly popping up everywhere he could see. He tugged the sizable volume that was _Vampire Vision_ , from its place, and skimmed the contents. It looked like it explained everything there was to know about vampiric, vision-based magic, which was far more detail than he had time for.

Reluctantly, he put it back and searched for a thinner book. A bright red volume caught his eye. Along the spine in narrow, stamped letters read, _Blood Brothers: My Life Amongst the Vampires_. It seemed more along the lines of what he was looking for anyway—a broad treatise on how vampires thought and behaved rather than simply their physical properties.

He took the book and flipped to the preface.

"I choose the title of this book very deliberately. It is about my _life_ amongst the vampires, and make no mistake. I was perfectly alive and well while I stayed with them, and remain so after my return. Common perception of vampires as lawless or monstrous are severely misguided, and I found myself compelled to pen this account in response to these attitudes. I hope it will serve as a counterexample, and correct many prevalent misconceptions about these marvelous beings."

Harry scanned the text, finding it a little dubious. "Marvelous" really wasn't an adjective that he would readily connect to the likes of Silviu. Still, he tucked the book under his arm and left the shelves to look for somewhere to sit.

He emerged in the centre of the library, directly beneath the column of chandeliers, and spotted Stephen sitting at a round wooden table that looked like a thin slice straight out of a gigantic tree.

"There you are," the other boy whispered as he came near. "Did you find what you were looking for?" Stephen had staked clear claim of the table, having spread several rolls of parchment, his inkwell and blotter, and a pile of books all around. Harry took a seat across from him, rolling the end of some parchment away to free some space. Despite its grainy appearance, the surface of the table was perfectly smooth under his hand.

"Sort of," he whispered back. "You were right. Madam Pince wasn't much help."

"Told you. Here, have a look at this," said Stephen, pushing the bottom book of his stack towards Harry, heedless of the books that cascaded down his arm with a dull thud. Harry spun the offered book around with his fingers. _Ingrid's Ingredient Index_ , it was called. Stephen reached over and opened the book for him, navigating it with much familiarity despite that it was upside-down.

"Brilliant," said Harry, when he stopped at the heading, "Reverse Amplifiers (Self-Cancellers, Multiplicative Reducers)," beneath which was simply a list of ingredients and page numbers.

"Right? And then you can go to the entry when you find the one you want, and it even references other books about it, and the potions that it's used in," Stephen explained.

"Which one are you writing about?" Harry asked.

"Sopophorous bean," said Stephen. "Its juice affects memory and consciousness and the like so it's in all sorts of potions."

"Nice," said Harry, as he glanced down the list. The "Poisons/Antidotes" section caught his eye, and he picked graphorn horn on a whim and made a note to look it up. He wasn't Stephen, however, and wasn't about to complete his homework a whole week before it was due.

Flipping past the preface of his vampire book, Harry discovered that it was a sort of memoir, rather than a monograph, and not the sort of book that could be read out of order. On the other hand it was not very long, a mere hundred fifty pages, and written in vivacious prose, so it seemed, so Harry set himself to it.

Eldred Worple, the author of the book, had apparently first made his way into an Italian vampire company as dinner. Despite this less than illustrious beginning, his quick wit and his transfiguration skill allowed him to talk his way into their good graces, after vanishing all the vampires' teeth (he restored them later). Harry thought this was a pretty creative defence, except that it was unfortunately easily countered by any vampire with a wand.

Curiously, Worple mentioned being bitten multiple times, and explained that with blood-replenishing potion on hand, it was perfectly safe. It was a misconception that the vampire bite could cause a transformation on a living person. At most, repeated exposure and the imbibing of the vampire's blood could create a sort of mental link, and induce irritability in the face of garlic and sunlight.

Harry frowned. That couldn't be right. The school healer and Professor Quirrell had implied that there were stages of the curse, and that it could become more severe. On the other hand, this was a published book.

"Hey Stephen," Harry whispered. Stephen ignored him for a few moments in favour of rolling his blotting paper all over his essay. Then he finally looked up.

"What?"

"Do you know anything about vampires?" That was perhaps too general. "Like how people become vampires?"

"If they get bitten," said Stephen. "I think it's kind of like with werewolves too."

Harry didn't know much about werewolves, except that being bitten by one was very bad, so that was hardly any help.

"Why?" Stephen wanted to know.

"Er, this book is saying that being bitten by a vampire won't transform you and that it's totally safe," Harry said. Stephen shook his head.

"Really?" he said. "That doesn't sound right to me. Everyone knows vampire bites are infectious. Why are you reading that anyway? _Blood Brothers_? Is it fiction?"

"I'm pretty sure it's not fiction," said Harry.

"Then why are you reading it? It's not like Professor Quirrell is going to give you extra points for it."

In a way, Harry thought, this sort of was extra reading for Professor Quirrell. But he only said, "It's just for fun."

In the end, Harry decided not to check the book out, and followed Stephen down to dinner, empty-handed. Afterwards they were roped into several rounds of exploding snap, which led to a singed Oliver extolling the virtues of muggle games that did not explode, and introducing all the first years to a board game called "Monopoly." Terry spent most of the rest of the evening alternating between marvelling that the pieces did not move on their own and exclaiming over the flimsy paper money.

Harry forgot all about the workings of the vampire curse until the next morning, when an owl swooped low overhead and dropped a paper-wrapped parcel into his porridge, which splattered all over his robes. He looked all around in vain for a serviette or something to wipe himself with, finally remembered that he was a wizard, and tried to cast the scouring charm on himself—tried being the operative word, as he only barely managed to remove the worst of the grains and still left a dark stain, along with a copious amount of magical soap residue.

It was a textbook case of when the siphoning charm was more appropriate for cleaning than the scouring charm, but unfortunately Harry was even less passable at the former than the latter.

Giving up, he turned to the offending package instead, and fished it gingerly out of the bowl. It was a little sodden, but as he extracted it it magically dried and straightened itself out. By this, Harry knew immediately that it was from Petri. This was the sort of packaging he would use to send owl orders for his shop.

He tugged at the end of the white bow and watched the parcel unwrap itself. The thick brown paper danced to the side, rolled itself up, and fell onto the ribbon, which twisted into a neat knot around the scroll before going limp. The wooden box within clattered to a stop on the table and a parchment note slid off it. Harry picked the letter up first:

_Dear Harry,_

_Enclosed is an amulet which has been enchanted to 'do nothing,' as you put it. Certainly, you already should know the theory behind this enchantment, if you only think a little. What spell is required for every enchantment? What else should you add, if you want nothing, null? In practice it is harder to cast, because you need also null intent. We may discuss it later when you return._

_The Evil Eye is not a very common charm in modern day. I am very surprised that it is still taught. For charm analysis, the Structure Sight spell (Comp. p. 2658) is much simpler, and less disruptive. For charm replacement, the Holdfast variant of the cancellation charm (Comp. p. 542) is almost always the preferred method. The only cases where Evil Eye may be better is for a moving object, e.g., replacement of an active flight charm, or unwilling living creature._

_There is no enchantment that protects against vampires, specifically. If there were, many problems could be solved. Your professor must be using a more ordinary defence; perhaps garlic or rose, although I do not recall headaches as a possible result of exposure to either of these. Your symptoms should not be progressing, as you are now far from our friend. If anything, I expect them to improve and disappear by the end of this year_.

Harry paused and reread the previous line. His symptoms were supposed to be going away? Petri was no expert on vampires, so perhaps he was mistaken. If he were here, he could do his own examination. But what about the suggestion that the Evil Eye wasn't a great spell, with references included? Harry did not doubt that Petri knew what he was about on the charms front.

Perhaps it was Professor Quirrell who had made a mistake. Harry had to admit that the man did not seem overly competent in lessons. Hadn't he used to be the Muggle Studies professor? Harry remembered Penelope mentioning something like that.

Or maybe, Harry thought with sudden coldness, Professor Quirrell had placed some other kind of curse on him, under the flimsy guise of examining him. That was what the Evil Eye was really for, wasn't it, according to the _Compendium_? Petri, who apparently was under the misconception that first years were being taught advanced, obscure charms in class, had even listed unwilling creatures as a use case. No doubt that was the legally acceptable euphemism for cursing people.

Hastily, Harry set down the letter and slid the wooden cover off his box. Inside was a flat, dark blue glass pendant in the abstract shape of a soaring bird. Harry snatched it up and tugged the chain over his head. He paused, concentrating, but he felt no different. Of course he felt nothing—the amulet was only supposed to stop the Evil Eye from working in the first place. It didn't end curses.

"Ooh, who's that from?" Lisa asked, and Harry finally recalled his surroundings. All his nearby housemates were looking at him, some more surreptitiously than others, but they were still clearly curious about his mail.

"Er, my uncle," said Harry.

"Sorting present, eh?" said Anthony. "Nice."

Harry supposed it could be construed as a Ravenclaw eagle, if one squinted. He wondered if Petri had done it on purpose, or if it was a coincidence.

"It's kind of girly," said Terry.

"It is not!" Lisa said loudly, rounding on him. Terry shrank back slightly. "It's actually a rather masculine piece. Don't you know anything about jewellery? Look at the chain..."

Harry suspected Terry, like him, did not in fact know anything about jewellery. Privately, he also thought it seemed a little girly to wear a necklace, but it was that or remain vulnerable to the Evil Eye. After all, maybe he had been cursed with something that needed to be applied repeatedly. Weren't there a lot of curses that were like that?

While Lisa tried to educate everybody about fashion, predictably getting into an argument with Sue and Mandy two seconds later, Harry tucked the pendant under his shirt and returned to his letter:

_I hope you have been keeping up with your exercises. As you are attending school, I have less time to teach you in person, but that means you must practise all the more diligently. I expect you to be ready to proceed to the next step of study by summer next year, so you will first need to master your animation charms. Of course, do not neglect your school subjects either. Take care._

_Yours,_

_JP_

Harry wasn't sure what to think. By "next step," did Petri mean spirit conjuration? Thoughts of dementors and disembodiment flashed unbidden through his mind. Or was it going to be some other kind of necromantic enchantment? And where was he supposed to get convenient dead animals to animate?

He must have looked consternated, because Anthony leaned over and said, "What? What's it say?" Harry tugged the letter back and folded it up for good measure.

"He's just telling me to study a lot," he said, which was true.

"That's criminal," said Terry.

"How are you even in Ravenclaw?" Anthony muttered, though he hardly sounded surprised.

"I like learning," said Terry. "Doesn't mean I like studying. Come on. Nobody _likes_ studying."

Fortunately for Terry, Lisa was still embroiled in debate with Sue, and could do no more than glare at him from across the table. He seemed to recognise that he had only narrowly escaped danger, and stood up the next moment.

"I'm off exploring," he said, glancing up at the cloudless ceiling of the Great Hall. "It's a nice day. Want to come?"

Anthony joined him, but Harry declined, not yet through with his breakfast. The porridge was possibly ruined, so he grabbed a bit of toast and marmalade instead.

After breakfast, he returned to the common room with some of the other first years, unsure what he was going to do with the rest of his day. An off day, spent by himself rather than supervised, was something of a novelty to him. On the other hand, he still had unfinished homework, namely Professor Snape's essay and some reading for Defence Against the Dark Arts.

As they gained entry to the common room after some bickering with the knocker about what constituted the property of "roundness," Sue stopped by the bulletin board and waved everyone over to join her.

"Look, all the clubs are recruiting," she said. "Ooh, there's a Gobstones club!"

Harry wrinkled his nose.

"What's that?" Oliver asked.

"It's like marbles, but they squirt disgusting stuff in your face," Harry explained.

"Don't listen to him," said Sue. "It's a high-stakes game of skill and strategy. You'd love it."

"Hey look, chess club," said Stephen. "I expect Terry and Anthony will want to join that."

"What about you?" Harry asked. Stephen shrugged.

"Chess is all right, but I don't want to do tournaments or anything," he said.

"Yeah," Harry agreed. His own experience with chess amounted to vaguely knowing what the pieces were called and how they moved. His eyes wandered sceptically over the other eye-wateringly colourful, animated club fliers that papered the board. There was choir, broom racing, astronomy, runes, magizoology, and to his surprise, charms:

_CHARMS CLUB_

_Ever wondered at a practical use for a dancing pineapple? Wished you could make your books read themselves out loud, or have your poetry come alive?_

_Join us in CHARMS CLUB on Saturdays at 7PM, North Rotunda (near the Astronomy Tower). We discuss a new charm each week. All experience levels welcome._

Below the text was a graphic of a tap-dancing pineapple wearing sunglasses. As he watched, the pineapple developed stubby stick arms and began executing some rather risque moves.

Harry figured he knew now what he would be doing this evening. It would be remiss not to visit this club at least once.

For the moment, he decided to take Petri's reminder to heart and dig out the exercise book from his trunk. The first thing on there, he was reminded, was permanent animation, of the dancing pineapple sort. After that was the sequel to both this exercise and levitation, which was something that moved while levitating, and so simulated flight. Harry sighed and made a mental note to save an apple or pear at lunch, and use it to start practising animation afterwards. To make sure he didn't forget, he rummaged around in his trunk until he produced his remembrall. The swirling smoke inside promptly turned an unpleasant maroon that indicated he should get his priorities straight.

He gave it an impatient shake to clear it. He knew that he was putting off thinking about Professor Quirrell's possible curse—there wasn't anything he could realistically do about it for the moment. The best person to consult would have been the Defence professor, after all, but alas that happened to be Quirrell himself.

The smoke swirled and then settled into a reddish-orange cloud. Harry scowled. He was about to forget things if he didn't review them, but he'd learned so many things under the influence of this remembrall that the reminder feature was basically useless. He didn't have the time or the energy to run through all the properties of blood from every species of creature. Pixie blood crystallized and turned to dust when exposed to silver. Dragon was especially finicky and there were a dozen uses…

He shoved the remembrall into his pocket, and his thoughts calmed somewhat. Did he really still need to know how to prepare every sort of inferius? Though they lived in a graveyard, Petri had not touched a human corpse (that Harry knew of) since they moved to England. It almost seemed like he was trying to be sort of law-abiding. Considering they weren't allowed to live in a graveyard in the first place he was still doing a piss-poor job of it, but it was a relative improvement.

Regretting that he had checked out neither the vampire book nor something relevant to his Potions essay, Harry reached under his bed and extracted the only non-textbook he owned—namely _Secrets of the Hieroglyphical Figures_.

Idly, he took a quill and traced over the inscription in the flyleaf. As he had suspected, this caused the book to transform back into its original letter form.

"Neat," he murmured to himself, and put the letter back under the bed, into his cauldron. Then he returned downstairs to see if anybody was doing anything fun. He needed a hobby.

The common room was mostly empty, with only some upper years occupying this or that corner. Harry couldn't spot any of his year-mates anywhere. Perhaps Terry and Anthony had had the right idea to go exploring, after all.

Once outside, Harry arbitrarily decided to go upstairs. As soon as he stepped onto the staircase, however, it trembled and then gave a great grinding lurch, throwing him to the side as it swiveled about. Harry clung to the handrail for dear life.

The stair had done a sort of steepening move, and now connected two floors up from where Harry had started. As he made it to the landing, he saw with some wonder that the rafters were actually visible, so he must be on the top floor. He tried to find some kind of window to look out, wondering how high up he was, but there was none.

The landing was thickly carpeted in burgundy and lit by wall-mounted torches. Between each pair hung a portrait or tapestry. They seemed primarily to feature landscapes, and Harry couldn't spot any sign of movement.

There were two open archways on either side of the room, both leading into darkness. Harry cautiously peered into one, jumping back as torches suddenly flared to life down its length. They only illuminated more carpeted stone, so Harry ventured forwards.

As he turned the corner he nearly collided with the hulking form of Vince Crabbe. Draco Malfoy and Goyle were close behind.

"Oh, sorry, hey," Harry mumbled as he stepped back.

"Alright Harry," said Vince with a lopsided smile.

"Hello, er, Harry," said Draco. "What are you doing up here?"

"Just exploring," Harry said, and was about to return the question when Draco started talking again.

"They say the Gryffindor common room is somewhere around here," he murmured conspiratorially. "It's supposed to be guarded by a portrait."

Harry cast his gaze down the long hall, which was completely lined with a variety of paintings—landscapes as before, but also, indeed, portraits.

"That's helpful," he said dubiously. "What does the portrait do? Dare you to do something stupid?"

The other boys chuckled, though Harry had meant it seriously.

"Probably needs a password," Draco said.

"How are you going to find that out?" Harry asked. A password? That seemed much more secure than the Ravenclaw knocker. Then again, the knocker was very particular about the sort of answers it would accept, and he doubted a non-Ravenclaw, unfamiliar with its workings, would be able to get past it easily. Even older students often had trouble.

Draco shrugged elegantly. "Subterfuge skills," he said.

"If we find the portrait," said Vince, "we'll just wait for some Gryffindor to walk up and say it."

This idea was not half bad, except for one glaring problem.

"And hide where?" Harry pointed out. The corridor was bereft of furniture, statues, or even the clunky suits of armour that seemed to populate most of the castle. "And why are you trying to get into the Gryffindor common room anyway?"

"We're not," said Draco. "You just assumed."

"Oh, sorry," said Harry, as he tried to think back on the conversation. He found himself drawing a blank. The remembrall trembled in his pocket, tickling his leg, and he patted it with more force than perhaps was necessary.

"What?" Draco asked, following his hand. Harry sighed and extracted the remembrall, which had thankfully cleared to white.

"It's a remembrall," he explained. "It helps you remember things, sort of. Really it tells you when you've forgotten something. Though it doesn't actually tell you _what_ you forgot."

"I've heard of them, but I've never seen one before," said Draco. "I thought only old people used them."

Harry frowned. "No, it's pretty useful for revising," he said, though he wasn't sure reciting necromancy procedures to oneself really counted as revising, exactly.

Draco looked sceptical.

"Where can you get one?" Vince asked.

"A shop?" Harry said rather unhelpfully. "I dunno. My uncle makes these."

Unbidden, the image of Uncle Vernon crafting remembralls with his meaty muggle hands popped up in his mind, and he had to suppress a snort. Moments later, a scowling Petri appeared with the killing curse on his lips and Uncle Vernon keeled over like a sack of potatoes. Harry blinked rapidly to clear the strange fantasy from his mind—he still wasn't fully used to thinking of Petri as "Uncle Jochen."

"Are you a pureblood then?" Draco asked, in a totally irrelevant way. Harry blinked again. "By the way, what's your surname again?"

"Half-blood," Harry said, after a beat, wondering if the Malfoys were the sort of purebloods who looked down on everybody else of lesser blood. Probably. He was half-tempted to tell Draco that he didn't have a surname at all. See what the rather pompous boy made of _that_. Instead, he simply said, "My name's Potter," and watched with some schadenfreude as Draco failed to understand him, and had to suffer in ignorance on account of etiquette.

"Oh," said Draco. "Well, I suppose that's alright then. Say, do you want to come with us, then?"

"To look for the Gryffindor common room?" Harry asked. But Draco shook his head.

"No, actually," and here, Draco paused to look around, as if afraid there would be somebody lurking in the shadows to overhear, "my father told me about this room where there are all sorts of things left over from previous students. Mostly rubbish, I expect, but there could be something interesting. It's supposed to be on this floor, near a tapestry with some trolls in it, but the entrance is hidden."

"Is there a password to this one too?" Harry asked.

"No, you just really have to want to door to appear," Draco said.

Harry was a little sceptical of this, but saw no reason not to help search for this room. It wasn't as if he were doing anything more than wandering aimlessly before.

"Okay," he agreed. "Let's look around. Or should we split up?"

"You and I can look together," said Vince.

"Split up to where? We've just come straight from the grand stair and there haven't been forks," Draco pointed out. That said, he forged ahead, going the way Harry had come.

When they returned to the landing at the end of the next corridor, Harry blinked in surprise.

"There was a stair there," he said, pointing to a dark archway. "I came up this way."

"You and Vince go there, then," said Draco.

"Okay," said Harry.

As they passed beneath the arch, torches again lit up along the entire corridor, revealing much of the same décor as they had seen already. It would be all too easy to get lost in this place, especially with all the moving about the castle seemed to favour.

"What do trolls even look like?" Vince wondered aloud.

"I'm not sure," Harry admitted. "Big, I suppose, and sort of like people." All he knew about trolls was that they were large, stupid, and comparable to hags in magical resistance.

Portraits and landscapes were all instantly ruled out, but there were several tapestries featuring rather ugly or heavily stylised subjects that required some consideration before being rejected.

"What about this one?" Vince asked. Harry scrutinised the large, garishly golden work. It depicted some humanoid figures with square faces and bulbous noses fighting some kind of winged, multi-headed beast. The figures moved in organised ranks and sported long spears and tall, rectangular shields. As they watched, one of the creature's heads spat out a flaming green glob and the flank of the formation went down in a sickly cloud of smoke. Pandemonium reigned.

A nearby plaque read, unhelpfully, "Golden Hydra."

"I think those are humans," Harry determined at length. "Just weird-looking." Fortunately, they had yet to encounter any woven art that paid them any attention or talked, so Harry felt no compunctions in making rude comments.

In the end, they ran into Draco and Goyle again as they emerged from the other end of the corridor. The two had stopped in front of a very odd tapestry featuring a wizard unsuccessfully herding a horde of giant, hairy people in pink tutus.

"I think this is the one," said Draco as they approached. Harry spotted a plaque beside the work. "Barnabas the Barmy," it read. Harry wondered whether that was the name of the artist or subject.

"Probably," Harry agreed. It was a distinctly ridiculous piece, and eye-catching.

They stood in front of the tapestry and thought very hard about wanting to find some old rubbish. It didn't work.

"Is it lunchtime yet?" Vince asked, after a minute.

"Quiet, I'm focusing," said Draco, his pointed face all scrunched up in concentration. Harry wondered if maybe Draco's father had just been having him on. But no, it didn't seem like the sort of thing an uptight Lucius Malfoy would do.

Harry idly flicked his wand to check the time. It was, in fact, lunchtime. Vince saw him and copied him.

"Draco, I'm hungry. Let's come back later," Vince whinged.

"You go then," said Draco, waving his hand dismissively. Vince looked a little torn. Goyle, on the other hand, had already turned to leave.

"Okay, bye," he mumbled, and started down the hall. Since Draco was still staring intently at the trolls, who had produced clubs and begun beating up the wizard, Harry nodded to Vince and hurried after Goyle.

"Aren't the stairs over there?" he asked, after a beat, glancing back the way they'd come. Goyle shrugged and kept walking.

They made a circuit around nearly the entire floor before reaching the grand stair. Harry sighed and decided not to comment.

"Vince," he said instead, "are you going to join any clubs?"

"Clubs?" Vince asked, looking perplexed. Harry remembered belatedly that Vince was illiterate. He wondered what the boy was doing about his essays.

"You know, where people get together to do things. Like chess, or charms. I'm thinking of going to the charms club," Harry said.

"They do magic there?" Vince asked.

"I think so," said Harry. "Do you want to come? The first meeting is supposed to be later today, after dinner."

"Okay," said Vince.

"We can go together," said Harry. "What about you, Goyle?"

Goyle shrugged. "Maybe," he said. They lapsed into silence.

Wizards, Harry thought, could really benefit from more widespread use of lifts. Seven flights and some cramped legs later, they finally arrived at the Great Hall, which was already merry with the roar of conversation and clinking of silverware. A heavy, savoury smell wafted out the open double doors. Vince livened up instantly and he and Goyle hurried inside, where they split off towards the Slytherin table.

Harry spotted a bowl of pears and filched a couple for later, dropping them into his expanded robe pockets, where they disappeared without the slightest bulge. Then he set into an excellent chicken pie. He was nearly done by the time any other first years appeared in the hall. Stephen went to sit somewhere on the other side of the table, perhaps with his sister, while Oliver, Michael, and Lisa joined Harry at the end.

"Did you see?" Oliver said as he scooted onto the bench. "First flying lessons next Wednesday."

Harry nodded, vaguely remembering something like that from his timetable.

"Flying!" Oliver repeated. "Isn't that wicked? On brooms, even."

"I don't see why we need lessons," said Lisa. "It's easy. You sit on the broom and point it where you want to go."

Michael frowned like he disagreed vehemently, but he did not say anything. Perhaps he was chary of getting into an argument with Lisa.

"I've never even seen a real-life flying broom before," Oliver pointed out.

"Well, yes," said Lisa, a little chagrined. "I meant, maybe the lessons should be optional."

"By that logic," Harry could not resist saying, "all the lessons should be optional in case we already know what they're teaching." Heavens knew he could stand to skip Charms, at least for the moment, and he was sure they could just cut History of Magic out of the curriculum entirely if it weren't mandatory.

For once, Lisa had nothing to the contrary to say.

Harry left soon after that to find some empty room to practise his animation enchantment. Like the levitation enchantment, it was simply a combination of the animation and nullity charms. Unlike the levitation enchantment, the intent was much more finicky. Harry cast the regular animation charm a few times to decide on the sort of movement he wanted his pear to execute before focusing on only that movement.

Some hours into his practice, during which he had made what felt like no progress whatsoever, Vince's bulky form appeared in the doorway. Given that Harry had come to the same room they'd used to practice the match to needle transfiguration, he supposed it wasn't too surprising that Vince had had the same idea.

"Oh," said Vince upon seeing him already inside, and turned as if to leave.

"Come in," said Harry. "Were you going to practise something?" He looked Vince up and down and spotted, to his surprise, a thin paperback clasped in his hands.

"Er, no, nothing," said Vince.

"Come on," said Harry more forcefully this time, waving his hand. "I'm just working on some charms."

With some hesitation, Vince finally entered, ducking under the waterfall of burgundy lace that half-obscured the entrance. Shooting Harry another uncertain look, he sat down gingerly on a chair and set his book on his lap. Harry glanced at it from the corner of his eye. From this distance it looked to be a periodical of some sort, and there was a subtly shifting illustration of a man in a droopy beret on the front.

Harry tried " _Locomotor deleo_ " again, and the pear started dancing before immediately falling still as soon as Harry lowered his wand. He sighed.

Vince had opened his magazine and appeared to be reading it. Perhaps he was literate after all? Harry felt silly for assuming otherwise—it was probably a misunderstanding.

Several more failed enchantment attempts later, Harry's curiosity had overcome any pretence of focus, and he finally said, "What are you reading?"

Vince glanced up and held the magazine to his chest, as if embarrassed. Harry stared at him, and he finally mumbled, "Martin Miggs."

"What's that?" said Harry.

Instead of explaining, Vince handed the magazine to him, and Harry glanced over it curiously. "The Adventures of Martin Miggs: Mad Muggle," it said on the cover in bold red letters. The image of what was presumably Martin Miggs on the front could have been mistaken for a muggle drawing, if it weren't for the fact that he blinked every once in awhile, and his clothing rustled with the rise and fall of his chest. He flipped through the pages and saw more of the same sort of thing. It was a comic magazine, Harry supposed. Dudley had once gone through a phase of obsessing over the things.

"Neat," said Harry, handing it back.

"You really don't know about it?" Vince asked. Harry shook his head. "It's about this muggle, Miggs. He does all sorts of jobs for people. And thing is, he doesn't even have magic!"

"Well, yes, muggles tend not to," Harry said, a little confused.

"But they don't realise it, see," said Vince. "They think he's a normal guy. Like in this one, he gets switched out with the Quidditch referee at the World Cup and has to make all the right calls without blowing his cover and getting obliviated."

"So he's like a spy?" Harry asked. Vince nodded.

"An agent of the Muggle Ministry! I can't believe you haven't heard of him," Vince said. "Even Draco-"

He suddenly broke off, his face falling rapidly into uncertainty, and then near panic.

"What?" Harry prompted.

"Nothing," said Vince very unconvincingly. Harry stared at him, and after a few long, awkward moments, the other boy folded. "It's just, you don't mind that I'm reading it, right? Some people-" He stopped again.

"Er, no," said Harry, thrown by Vince's strange concerns. "Of course I don't mind." Why would he? Was Vince afraid of getting teased? Perhaps the comic was considered childish or something. He supposed there must be a reason why Vince had come to such an out of the way place, by himself, just to read it.

Vince seemed to take his word for it, and gave a hesitant smile. "A lot of people love Miggs," he said, almost to himself, and then sat down to continue reading. Harry blinked in confusion and made an effort to return to his practice.

A few minutes later, Vince pitched forward in his seat with an excited, "Ha!"

"What?" Harry had to ask.

"Belgium cheated!" Vince jeered. "Look, they all thought Miggs was barmy but the Belgians are bloody cheaters. Knew it."

Harry had no idea what Vince was talking about, but found the comic magazine forcibly thrust under his nose. He obligingly looked.

There were several panels featuring people zooming about on broomsticks and throwing a large red ball through a hoop. Martin Miggs, who looked very confused, was shouting "Foul!" The audience was booing. These were the only text bubbles on the page. Harry flipped to the previous page in search of more context, but found little of use.

"Er, how do you know all that?" Harry asked. "It doesn't say it anywhere." Vince looked at him oddly, and put a beefy finger on one of the panels.

"Look, here are the chasers, and they're flying next to each other. Laurent is telling Piette he's pocked the quaffle to bounce. Now he's passing it. Piette scores. The crowd is screaming 'Piette, Piette!' but look, Miggs totally misses it because he's been trying to use his tacky-tone—kind of like a muggle version of floo call—but it won't work. It never works. Then he's calling foul and nobody believes him yet but he's right."

Harry wasn't sure he understood all the words coming out of Vince's mouth. More importantly, there was no transcript of what the two people on brooms, apparently Laurent and Piette, were saying to each other at all.

"But how do you know what they're saying?" Harry asked, pointing to the first panel again.

"Can't you tell?" Vince asked, looking honestly perplexed.

"Er, no," said Harry. "But I don't know that much about Quidditch. I mean I don't even know what poking the, er, coffle-"

"Pocking the quaffle," Vince corrected. "It's where you mess with it so it's heavier or lighter, or the like. But you don't need to know that. The point is they're cheating."

"Okay," said a nonplussed Harry, pushing the comic magazine back. But Vince did not take it.

"I'm done," he said. "You can look at the rest. They usually just talk about what happened at the end, like we didn't already see it. It's boring."

Harry wasn't all that interested, but he _was_ curious to see if Vince had been making things up or not, so he paged through the remainder of the story. The Belgians had been cheating, sure enough, and Miggs had accidentally made the right call. There was no mention of "pocking the quaffle" anywhere.

"You haven't read this before?" Harry asked, looking up suddenly. "The end?"

Vince shook his head. But then how had he known?

"And you just know what happens?" Harry pressed. Vince nodded.

"Well, of course. It already happened," Vince said. Harry was sure that that was not how it worked. Was there some kind of spell on the comic magazine that he had failed to activate?

"Hey, I think it's dinnertime," said Vince, interrupting his bewilderment. Harry tried to give Vince the comic back but he refused again. "Just keep it," he said.

"Are you sure?" Harry asked, and Vince nodded firmly, so he rolled it up and shoved it in his pocket.

As promised, they headed to charms club together after dinner. To Harry's great surprise, none of the other Ravenclaw first years came along. Nobody seemed much interested. As Lisa put it, Charms was "curricular," not "extracurricular."

Vince and Harry made their way towards the astronomy tower, where they had had lessons on constellations at midnight the previous Wednesday. The tower was almost a straight shot from the Ravenclaw common room and so easy enough to find for Harry. Just short of the steep spiral staircase up to the parapets, a fiery message spelled itself out repeatedly in the air: "Charms Club" it said, and an artistic tail below trailed off into an arrow to the left. Harry wondered if this was some sort of animation enchantment, and whether that meant someone might be able to give him a few pointers.

Taking a left brought them to a smaller spiral staircase, this one carpeted in white rather than bare stone. They soon emerged into the rotunda, an octagonal room whose wood-paneled walls were beset with what appeared to be hundreds of sparkling crystals. The floor was silvered and gleamed with mirror-like intensity, and all the furniture in the room appeared to be made of glass.

An older girl in Gryffindor red and gold who had been reclining on a translucent bench stood to greet them, grinning at their gaping faces.

"Neat spot, innit?" she said, sticking out a hand. "Hope you're here for charms club. I'm Elaine Frobisher, president."

"Harry," said Harry, shaking Elaine's hand, and Vince followed suit.

"You firsties?" she asked. Harry nodded, and her grin widened. "Capital! Fresh meat. Just kidding. A little. Not really. Hey, Vicky! Come make friends."

Vicky, a girl closer to Harry's age who had the same lank, chestnut-brown hair and flat lips as Elaine, introduced herself with rather little pleasure as, "Vicky Frobisher, pleased to meet'cha."

The other occupants of the room were both older Hufflepuffs, but with nothing else in common: one a tall and well-built boy in prim, pressed school robes and the other a rail-thin girl wearing her tie around her neck, a T-shirt featuring a cello and some illegible words emblazoned on the front in flashing letters, and faded muggle jeans and combat boots. Her hair was also bright pink.

"Wotcher," she greeted with a friendly wave. "I'm Tonks and this is Gabe. Say hi, Gabe."

"Yes, hello. I'm Gabriel. Nice to meet you all," said Gabe (or perhaps he preferred Gabriel) rather stiffly.

"Nice to meet you. So that fire outside," Harry said, "did one of you do that?"

"That'd be me," said Elaine. "Flame-drawing charm. Learned that one, hm, a couple years ago, now. Incantation _flagrate,_ and you've got to trace the whole word with your wand. Want to try?"

"Er," said Harry, feeling a little put upon the spot. He drew his wand. " _Flagrate,_ " he said, supposing the end of his wand should light up, and wrote "HELLO" in the air.

As he finished the last letter, the first had already begun to dissolve away, but he counted it as decent for a first try.

Elaine was clapping her hands. "Brilliant," she said, "You'll have that one down in no time. What about you, want to give it a go?" she asked Vince.

A great gout of fire shot out of the end of Vince's wand when he attempted the spell, not unlike the result of a strong _incendio_. Everybody jumped back.

"Whoa there," said Elaine, chuckling a little nervously. "Maybe a little less enthusiasm."

Vince ducked his head and muttered, "Sorry."

At this point, they were interrupted by several new arrivals to the rotunda. First was an imposing Slytherin boy who had a good foot on Vince and looked like he could effortlessly tie Harry into a knot, with arms as thick as his head and hands the size of dinner plates. After him were more familiar faces—Cho and Marietta, from Ravenclaw, the Hufflepuff girl who had sat beside him in Potions, Hannah, and finally, Neville from the train.

"Cassius, Cho, Marietta, hey," Elaine greeted. Vicky perked up and immediately dragged Cho and Marietta to a far corner. The large boy, Cassius, nodded and sat down on the nearest glass bench while Elaine acquainted herself with Hannah and Neville.

"Okay, it's seven ten so I reckon it's about time we get started," said Elaine, clapping her hands and moving to stand in the centre of the rotunda, behind a half-moon glass table. Her voice boomed across the room, obviously amplified by the _sonorus_ charm.

Given the small size of the gathering, it seemed rather unnecessary, but Harry supposed it was for effect. Indeed, she removed it a moment later.

"Alright. You've all met me now I think, but anyway I'm Elaine, and I'm president of this club, which is charms club. We're not the biggest club, I know, but we do good stuff. Namely, charms. Charms are pretty much anything that's not transfiguration, really, so basically, everything useful. You may be thinking, well, stuff we learn in class is totally useless. You're probably right. So that's why we have this club. For the good stuff."

"I dunno, cheering charm's pretty good stuff," said Cassius.

Elaine shrugged. "Yeah. Cheering charm's good. So we learned it as firsties, didn't we? We'll teach all you youngsters that one, too, but don't let us catch you abusing it. Or Professor Flitwick. Anyway, today's charm, by popular vote—sorry firsties, you'll get to vote next time—is the knitting charm! Also sorry Tonks."

Tonks made a show of groaning loudly and sinking her face into her hands, which seemed to have lengthened impossibly to cover it. Marietta giggled.

"The knitting charm's not just for your mum, anyway," said Elaine. "It's not even really specifically a knitting charm, especially if you don't know how to knit. It's a variant of _locomotor_ -"

"Everything's a variant of _locomotor_ ," said Tonks, who had recovered from her faux hysterics. "Even _locomotor_ 's a variant of _locomotor._ "

"'Cause _locomotor's_ bloody useful innit?" said Elaine. "So like I was saying, and stop interrupting me Tonks, it's a spell that animates needles and threads. So actually you can use it for sewing too, or stabbing and strangling people, which I'm sure is more up your alley." She leered at Tonks. "We'll start with the needle part so it's less complicated. The incantation is just _acu texis_ , and it's supposed to help if you do the wand movement like you want the needle to move. I've tried it out a couple times myself though it's still a bit iffy. Look."

She pulled a pair of needles out of a small leather bag that hung at her hip, and set them on the table in front of her. Then she said the incantation and did a complicated push and pull motion, and the needles rose into the air and began clicking rather erratically together.

"If I try to add the yarn it fails catastrophically," she commented. Then she reached into her bag again, her arm disappearing implausibly up to the shoulder, and extracted a whole handful of needles, which she scattered all over the table. "Now you lot try it. I brought needles for everyone."

Tonks, despite her groaning, was very good at the charm, at least when it came to directing the needle exactly where she wanted it to go. Harry watched it stab itself repeatedly into the glass until it had scratched out an obscene graphic.

When the older students had got set up with their needles, Elaine herded Harry, Vince, and Hannah around one of the glass benches off to the side. "So I know it's your first week at Hogwarts and you've probably only cast _lumos_ and _periculum_ , well, I suppose you've done _flagrate_ now, Harry, but anyway I just want to let you know that there's a lot you can do even with charms that you haven't mastered, and let me and Tonks know if you ever need any pointers. I mean you can ask anybody, but we're in NEWT Charms, so."

"Newt charms?" Harry asked.

"NEWTs, you know? Those nasty Ministry exams you have to pass in seventh year. Before you all get started though I wanted to give you these," said Elaine, pulling out a stack of parchment from her bag.

They were membership sheets for the charms club, and Elaine explained that she had enchanted them with the protean charm, which meant that anything she wrote on the master copy would appear on their copies. She could see as well if one of them wrote something back, and that was how she collected their suggestions and votes every week for which charm to discuss at the meeting.

Then she gave them some more detailed instructions about the knitting charm. Since it was a variant of the animation charm, she suggested they practise that first, and showed them the wand movement and incantation.

"So is the knitting charm an animation enchantment?" Harry wanted to know.

"Well no, not technically," said Elaine. "You actually have to tell the needles exactly what you want them to do. And if you move them it'll disrupt the spell."

Harry nodded. An enchantment was different from an ordinary charm in that was no longer dependent on the caster after casting, and the effect was more or less permanent. The permanence aspect, of course, was the hardest part.

The knitting charm turned out not to be all that difficult. In fact, it felt basically like the animation charm to Harry, just with an alternate incantation, and he charmed his needle to lift into the air and twirl around on his first try. If anything, it was even easier than the animation charm. The only issue was that he did not actually know the first thing about how to knit.

"Wow!" Hannah said upon seeing his needle. Neville stopped waving his wand to listen. "How did you do that? Nothing's happening with mine."

Harry tried to think back on how he had originally learned the animation charm. "You really have to focus on exactly what you want to happen. It's like if you used your hand to move it."

Hannah was able to get her needle moving, if inelegantly, soon enough, and began trying the knitting charm proper, but Neville and Vince had both yet to produce any effect. Harry observed them, a little perplexed. As far as he could tell, both were managing the correct pronunciation and wand movement. They looked focused enough too, and the intent behind the animation charm was not exactly complicated.

Harry wondered if it was another case like _lumos_ had been. Perhaps the goal of the charm was too abstract or distant.

"Hey, let's try to charm the needles to sword fight," Harry said.

"I want to try with the second needle though," Hannah said, but Vince seemed interested enough.

Harry animated his needle to prod at Vince's prone one. "En garde!" he called, and his needle tapped threateningly over the other one. Vince was staring at it. "Hey," Harry said, waving his free hand, "aren't you going to fight back?"

Vince fumbled with his wand and then started frantically swishing and twirling it. Harry's needle abandoned its still opponent and advanced towards Vince's other arm, which lay exposed on the table, before giving it a solid prod.

"Ow!"

Harry pulled back and got ready to stab a second time. But this time there was a little "ping!" as Vince's needle shot up to parry.

"I did it!" Vince yelled, and promptly dropped his wand and the needle with it. Harry laughed.

"I dunno what I'm doing wrong," Neville said morosely. Harry had to agree – his form was impeccable, but the spell was not working at all.

Beside him, Hannah had managed to get two needles clicking together in jerky motions, and was busy trying to feed them a bit of yarn.

At the sound of a collective shout, Harry glanced across the room to find that Tonks was levitating what looked like all of Elaine's spare needles at once. With a grand motion of her arm, she sent them careening into the wall in a shower of metallic death. A good portion of them stuck in the wood.

"Mental!" Cassius cried, inspecting one of the bent needles that had clattered to the floor.

"Totally wicked, you mean," said Tonks, smirking.

"Mate, you're gonna be paying the damages," said Elaine. Tonks scoffed and did a sweeping _reparo_. Impressively, the needles extracted themselves, gathered in the air, and rolled lifelessly onto the table, while the pockmarked wall paneling sealed up and glistened as if newly varnished.

"It's a good thing she's a Hufflepuff," Vince whispered.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Hannah demanded. He raised his hands in a placating gesture.

"Nice, you know, friendly," he said hurriedly. "Wouldn't stab people for no reason." Hannah shrugged.

"I suppose," she said, and started fiddling with her needles and yarn again.

After a minute or so she threw her wand aside in frustration and simply grabbed a needle and the yarn in her hands. She tied a loop and, with some mesmerising, rapid twisting of her fingers, populated the length of the needle with more yarn loops. Then she took her wand, did the charm again, and slowly but surely, the needles began to knit.

"Wow," said Harry. "How does that work?" Even examining Hannah's knitting from all angles, he couldn't quite seem to figure out what the needles were doing so that the loops of yarn formed into a fabric rather than simply slipping away.

"How's what work? Knitting?" Hannah asked. Harry nodded. "Well it's kind of complicated to cast on. That's what it's called when you're starting. I couldn't get the charm to do it, but it's easy enough by hand. Once you've cast on you just stick your needle in the stitch here and loop the yarn over the back. That's called a knit by the way. To purl, you have to stick it in the back and put the yarn over the front."

She helpfully slowed her charm even more as she explained, and Harry thought he might have finally understood what was going on.

"I knit way faster by hand, but I can see how the charm could be useful," Hannah said. "I mean it knits even when I'm not paying attention. That's pretty brilliant."

Neville sighed forlornly at his unmoved needle. "I'm no good at charms," he muttered.

"You're doing it all the right way, you know," Harry said. "Wand movement, incantation, everything. Maybe just focus on making it move forward."

"Really?" Neville said, sounding doubtful. Harry nodded in what he hoped was an encouraging way.

While the others practiced the charm, Harry worked on learning how to knit, for lack of anything better to do. It was harder than it looked, and even though he could get the needles and yarn doing exactly what he wanted, what he wanted was continuously in question. Hannah giggled at him when he managed to tie several knots at the end of the row of stitches that she had helpfully "cast on" for him.

At length, somehow, Neville finally got his needle to leap into the air and off the edge of the bench.

"Nice job!" said Hannah. After this breakthrough, as was usually the case with charms, he began making significantly more progress, and soon he and Vince were engaged in a mock-fencing match. Or rather, Vince had charmed his needle to stab insistently at Neville, who had been forced to fight back, as there was nowhere to run.

"Where can I get yarn? And needles?" Harry asked Hannah.

"You're actually going to learn to knit?"

"Why not?" said Harry, shrugging. He could use some winter clothing, like a scarf or a hat. Merlin knew Petri was never going to buy him "unnecessary" new clothes, though he supposed that since he had his own money, he could owl order something. Some strange, irrational reluctance churned deep inside him at the thought. He felt suddenly uneasy—had Petri's stinginess rubbed off on him irreparably?

"There's a shop called Wilma's Wools in Carkitt Market," Hannah told him. "I get their catalogue. I can show you. Maybe next week? Are you going to be here again?"

Harry assured her that he would indeed be back for charms club the following week.

At the end of the hour, Elaine told them that they could, with the exception of Tonks who was expressly prohibited, keep their needles and practice yarn for a sickle a set—she wasn't made of gold, thank you very much. Harry did not make a habit of carrying money around, so he asked Elaine if she would accept an IOU.

"Sure, but I'll hex you if you try to cheat me," she said cheerfully.

Harry palmed his remembrall and gave a jerky nod, murmuring, "Bring a sickle, bring a sickle," to himself.

He returned to his dormitory in high spirits but also a bit enervated, now that he found himself suddenly alone. He rolled onto his bed and enjoyed the softness of the blanket for a moment before getting back to his feet so he could properly undress.

As he emptied out his pockets, he found the rolled-up Martin Miggs comic that Vince had gifted him. He pulled out his wand and pointed it at the magazine.

" _Specialis revelio_ ," he said, but nothing happened except that Martin Miggs on the cover shuffled away slightly from the tip of the wand. There probably wasn't any enchantment on the comic, then, or it should have been evident to the revealing spell, unless the author was trying to do something illegal and so hid it very well. Harry dropped it abruptly on his bed at that thought, and cast a few cancellation charms at it instead.

He'd ask Vince about it again, later, perhaps at next week's charms club. The other boy seemed to have enjoyed it well enough. Harry extracted his remembrall, which turned a cloudy maroon once more, as he set it gingerly on his side table.

Right. Quirrell.

Suddenly struck with an idea, Harry reached back to the pile of things that had come out of his pocket and snatched up Petri's letter from that morning, scanning it quickly. Then he grabbed a quill and the charms club membership parchment.

In the "suggestions for charms" box, he scribbled, "Structure Sight." If Petri mistook it as the sort of thing he was learning at Hogwarts, then what was to say that he _couldn't_ learn it? He would read up on it in the _Compendium_ tomorrow, and then if he was unable to get it on his own, he could ask Elaine or Tonks at the club.

Then he would get a definitive answer on just what Professor Quirrell had done to him.


	26. Enemy

"W-would you like to c-continue where we left off last, last time?" Professor Quirrell asked Harry after the Defence Against the Dark Arts lesson on Wednesday. Harry was perplexed until he added, "After dinner, p-perhaps."

As a matter of fact, Harry did not at all want to continue the impromptu dark arts tutoring from the previous week, especially not if it gave Professor Quirrell ample opportunity to curse him again. However, it occurred to him immediately that if he refused outright, Professor Quirrell might get suspicious that he had caught on, and do something more drastic.

So Harry said, "Er, sorry sir, I'm busy after dinner today." He cast around for a plausible excuse and gratefully seized on an event that all Ravenclaw House had been in an excited uproar about for the past few days, namely, "Quidditch tryouts! They're from seven to curfew. Maybe, er, next week?"

Professor Quirrell agreed about next week easily enough. Harry's gut churned. Perhaps the curse was more of a long-term sort, and Professor Quirrell only wanted to monitor the progress? He had to figure it out, and soon, which meant practice. He had looked up the structure sight spell that Petri had mentioned, but was so far unable to get it to work.

Except now he had to go to Quidditch tryouts. Harry wouldn't think to be concerned that a professor would actually check up on whether he had been honest, but this was Quirrell, who clearly had some nefarious motivations involving him. He supposed he could just go _watch_ the tryouts, along with probably two-thirds of the house. Nobody said he had to participate.

Of course, he changed his mind that afternoon.

It was just past three, half an hour before their flying lesson was set to begin, but a spirited mass of Ravenclaw first years were already marching intently across the grounds towards the Quidditch pitch, having abandoned their free period early. Nobody said anything, for they were all busy mentally preparing themselves. The time for empty boasting was over. Even Lisa, who had spent what felt like every waking moment of the past few days emphasising her aerial prowess, and how beneath her the lesson was going to be, looked a little pale now that it was actually about to happen.

They arrived in the middle of the flying instructor's preparations. She shot them a good-natured but exasperated smile before shooing them off to the side.

Terry sprawled out on the verdant grass, eyes shut against the glare of the sun, and was soon joined by Anthony, Lisa, and Oliver. Stephen sat daintily, folding the back of his robe carefully under him, probably in fear of wrinkles or grass stains.

"Those brooms look a thousand years old," said Morag with a sniff. Harry's gaze snapped to where the flying instructor was laying out broomsticks. He didn't know the first thing about brooms of the flying type, but he had to agree with Morag's assessment. Some of them would hardly pass sweeping standards with their bent twigs and prickly-looking handles.

Michael made a sort of abject moaning sound.

Just then, the Hufflepuffs arrived, chattering noisily, and made a beeline for their group.

"Hi Harry," said Hannah, giving him a small wave and coming near, followed closely by a sallow-faced girl and the plump boy with the green potion who had been the unfortunate recipient of Professor Snape's ire. "This is Susan and this is Ernie."

"Nice to meet you," said Harry. "I'm Harry."

Susan and Ernie sat down, but Hannah remained standing. She clutched her hands close to her chest and twisted back and forth. "Oh I'm so nervous," she muttered, though she was grinning.

"We won't have to go high up," said Susan. "Just keep calm and hold the broom steady."

"I know, I know," said Hannah, her voice getting more high-pitched, "But it's just it's not the same when you're actually up there, you know. Hah. I just need to stop thinking about it. What about you Harry, do you like flying?"

Harry shrugged. "Never tried it," he said. The Hufflepuffs looked astonished, as if he had just admitted to never having ridden a bicycle. Well he really had never ridden a bicycle, either.

"Well I suppose that's why they have the lesson," said Susan.

Soon they heard the high screech of a whistle, and everybody scrambled to their feet to go line up. The flying instructor introduced herself as Madam Hooch, and told them each to stand by a broom.

Harry ran ahead, hoping to be able to select a slightly less beaten-up specimen, but all the options were about equally dismal. He finally settled beside a broom whose handle, at least, did not look like it would instantly give him a thousand splinters on contact.

"Don't pick them up yet!" Madam Hooch said sharply, and a few students dropped brooms guiltily back in the grass.

"Put your hand over the broom, and say 'Up!' You need to be firm," she told them.

Harry wondered what the advantage of this was to simply bending down and taking the broom, as a cacophonous chorus of "Up!" echoed around the field and most peoples' brooms only twitched or rolled over. His broom, unlike the others, leapt into his hand immediately with a heavy thwack that stung his palm.

"Mount your brooms," Madam Hooch said, when everybody had finally managed to grab theirs. Harry had definitely seen some surreptitious bending down when Madam Hooch's back had been turned. "On my whistle, kick off the ground gently, and hover at chest height. Do not go higher!"

Harry gripped the handle tightly and waited. The broom thrummed slightly beneath him, as if eager to get off the ground. At the whistle, he barely bent his knees and straightened out when it began to rise into the air. How was he supposed to stop? Even at the thought, however, he found himself leaning back and pulling on the handle, which brought the broom to a gentle halt.

Occasionally the broom would twitch slightly, as if trying to wander off, but it was easy enough to correct for the motion. Once everyone had managed to hover and remain there, Madam Hooch set them to flying in straight lines, and then took them on a low-elevation circuit of the Quidditch pitch, which was an oblong, rounded rectangle surrounded by a raised terrace of stands for spectators.

As they picked up some speed and skimmed above the first row of stands, Harry could not help reaching out with one hand to feel the breeze rushing through his fingers. He was trailing behind a little, distracted. How to go faster? He tugged at the handle, and found himself drifting upwards, higher and higher, his classmates a river of black robes beneath him.

Almost on instinct, he hugged the broom, pulling up his legs and bracing his trainers against the bristles. He shot down like a rocket, whooping with exhilaration as he easily overtook the others, zooming past a blur of yellow and blue, and finally past Madam Hooch herself.

He didn't care if she yelled at him. Nothing could stop him right now.

She didn't yell. Harry relaxed marginally and gained more elevation, before falling forwards again. Up and down, up and down, and soon he had made an art of it, pulling up again before he quite lost his forward momentum each time, so that he picked up continuous speed. Feeling daring, he rolled upside down on the broom, and for a heart-stopping moment, almost lost his grip on the handle, before gravity re-asserted itself and forced him back against it.

He caught back up to the rest of his classmates as they were coming back down, having lapped them completely, and it was with great reluctance that he brought himself back to land. He had hardly managed to dismount when he was accosted by a mob, with Terry in the lead.

"Never ridden a broom before my arse!" he shouted.

"It's true, I never," Harry began, but was soon drowned out by various other exclamations.

"How did you do that?"

"That was amazing, mate!"

"Show-off!" said a surly Hufflepuff boy.

"Stuff it, Smith. You're just saying that because you know you couldn't pull off anything that wicked," said Ernie.

Harry smiled sheepishly, feeling a little disconcerted by all the attention. But he couldn't regret what he'd done. It might have just been the best five minutes of his life.

"So, Quidditch trials today," said Terry, clapping a hand on his shoulder.

"I'll be there," Harry told him, and grinned more genuinely. Then his face fell. "Er, I don't know all the rules of Quidditch, exactly."

Lisa and Terry spent what felt like the better part of the afternoon educating him on the positions, the plays, and his likelihood of making it onto the team.

"He's a shoo-in," said Terry.

"He's competing against older students," said Lisa. "I think you should go for seeker. You've got the perfect build for it."

"Are you joking? Weren't you just talking about older students? I heard Patil has been seeker since like, the dawn of time," Terry protested.

"But in this case it's a disadvantage for him that he's seventeen and tall," Lisa said. Terry shook his head.

"Harry is obviously brilliant at flying and all, but experience is different. Harry, you should definitely just go for one of the open positions. All of last year's talent have left, I heard. You could be beater or chaser. Probably chaser. I mean you need some serious arm strength for beater."

"Can I try out for more than one position?" Harry asked.

"Good point," said Lisa. "You might as well try out for them all."

There were, indeed, tryouts for all the positions. The keeper and seeker, of course, being incumbent, were unlikely to be unseated, but the Ravenclaw captain, a tall, broad girl with a dark, intense gaze named Eliza, was firm about seeing what everyone had to offer.

Harry had been right in his expectation that pretty much all Ravenclaw House was gathered to see the tryouts. He was simultaneously gratified and irritated to see that Professor Quirrell, too, had shown up. Discreetly, Harry checked that he still had his amulet for protection against the Evil Eye. The blue glass bird was reassuringly cool and smooth under his hand.

"I used to, to be a Ravenclaw, you remember," Professor Quirrell was saying to Professor Flitwick.

"Alright you lot, line up!" Eliza shouted. Her voice boomed across the pitch, cutting through the chatter easily—she must have used a _sonorus_. Her wand tip lit up then, casting a huge beam of light that cut easily through the dim twilight, and she swept it across the mass of Quidditch hopefuls who had huddled around the goal posts.

Most people, Harry was a little bit intimidated to see, had their own brooms, which all looked a sight sleeker and more polished than the battered school brooms. Still, that meant that, as he had arrived early, he had managed to borrow the newest of the lot from an enthusiastic Madam Hooch. The silver lettering on the handle had not yet been worn away, and Harry could actually make out the outline of the brand: "Shooting Star."

"There are way too many of you here, as usual," said Eliza, extinguishing the tip of her wand and leaving everybody momentarily blinded in the dark. "I want you all to fly three laps around the field. It's not a race. This isn't bloody broom racing club. Let's just make sure you know what you're about. There will be bludgers. GO!"

There was a confused rumble from the crowd, and then everybody was scrambling to mount their brooms and take off. A pair of bludgers, as promised, zoomed threateningly into the air and started to pelt those who lagged behind.

Harry had tugged sharply on his broom as soon as Eliza had given the go, and found himself instantly dragged high into the air with his legs still dangling freely. Heart hammering in his throat, he made an awkward lunge and tried to roll his body up onto the broom. Thankfully, it followed his intent and swept under his leg. He hugged it securely and then he was off.

It wasn't a race, Eliza had said, but people certainly were doing their damned best to get to the front. Some of the horde of people who had come to try out were obviously unfit, Harry noticed with some relief. They could hardly keep their brooms straight at high speed, and some even fell off without any help from the bludgers.

The bludgers, head-sized black wrecking balls of destruction, were also executing swift and silent slaughter. They were just short of impossible to see in the slightly misty darkness, and though they made a telltale rushing sound as they passed, it generally came too late to be anything more than a harbinger of regret. Harry quickly racked up several close calls, and once even had to repeat the rolling move he had tried earlier, except this time under duress. He actually let go of the handle entirely for a terrifying split-second this time, and only some miracle (or perhaps magic) had him flipping back on top of the broom the next moment, rather than in free fall.

The responsible bludger paused in the air, glinting subtly under the moonlight, as if perplexed at having missed its prey, and then zoomed back for a second round. This time, Harry was ready, and pulled nimbly out of the way.

He'd noticed that as he sped up, the broom would begin to vibrate a little, and move more jerkily. It wasn't all bad, though, because it made it easier to jump from side to side in the air, which made for a useful dodging manoeuvre.

When the bludger tried to go for yet another pass, Harry decided that he had had enough and dove sharply downwards, straight into the mass of remaining contenders. Somebody yelped in the distance as he careened past, and then there was a satisfying crunch and accompanying scream as the pursuing bludger found a replacement target.

Eventually, after the loosely-defined "laps" had dissolved into sufficient all-out chaos for her taste, Eliza screamed a _sonorus_ -enhanced, "STOP! EVERYBODY COME BACK!" and what was left of everybody, about a dozen contenders, landed with rather less energy than they had had at the start. Some of them looked to have been smacked by a bludger or two, but managed to remain on their brooms.

"Okay, we'll start with the beater tryouts," Eliza said. Harry decided to spare his strength in favour of the other positions. He wasn't sure he would even be willing to play beater. Dodging the bludgers was bad enough—having to constantly face them head-on seemed a bit much, even if he had a bat to help.

Also, the beater hopefuls were an intimidating lot, all tall and broad and built like bulls. It turned out that Eliza herself was a beater, and she flew up with the rest and smacked bludgers viciously at them until they all dropped out of the sky. Harry winced at each elimination and was glad he had abstained, even as he saw Professor Flitwick casting a slew of deceleration and cushioning charms at the falling students.

In the end, surprisingly, only the smallest of the lot, Inglebee or something like that, remained, and so he was made beater.

"He's got a head for strategy, obviously, unlike the other brutes," Harry heard Eliza saying to the others in the previous year's team. "He'll grow into it."

Next was the seeker tryout, which, though Eliza announced it as a free-for-all race to catch the snitch as quickly as possible, was really everybody against Patil, the lithe incumbent seeker whom Terry had described as playing "since the dawn of time."

The seeker hopefuls were all noticeably younger and smaller than the others. Lisa was trying out as well, and Harry recognised Cho Chang among several second-years.

It was almost pitch dark by now, with the moon having crept behind some thick cloud cover, so Harry really had no idea how they were supposed to find the snitch, golden or not. Nonetheless, they all kicked off at Eliza's whistle and shot into the sky.

Most of the others followed after Patil like a comet's tail, so Harry decided to employ a different strategy and went in the opposite direction. He had no idea what he was doing, however, and whatever his aerial prowess, he couldn't chase after something he couldn't find.

After about five minutes there was a loud cheer from the crowd, and Harry spun around to see Patil standing in the spotlight of Eliza's wand, arm raised and fluttering snitch in his grasp.

The next three rounds went about the same way. Patil caught it every time, even the last round when Cho caught sight of the snitch first. She had split off from his tail, but Patil had outstripped her despite her lead and swooped underneath her to snatch it away.

At this point, Eliza called an end and confirmed Patil's spot as seeker, while keeping an elated Cho on as reserve.

Finally were the keeper and chaser tryouts, and Harry supposed it was not in fact possible to try out for both positions. Besides last year's keeper, Grant Page, there was one other sixth or seventh year trying out for keeper. Harry decided to go for chaser. Eliza split the chasers into two groups of three, one for each keeper, and assigned them each one side of the pitch.

Harry found himself paired up with Lisa and one of the incumbent chasers, Roger Davies. They were up against Page.

"Eliza will be looking for team play," said Davies, drawing them into a huddle. "Grant's got a long reach and has this double guarding trick with his broom. The only way to get past him is with a really good feint."

That was all the time they got for advice before Eliza blew her whistle and launched two quaffles into the sky.

Harry flew up in the air, unsure of himself, but Davies obviously had no reservations zooming up and snatching the quaffle from where it had been levitating lethargically. Lisa flew parallel to him, so Harry hurried to catch up.

Davies's broom was clearly better than the school brooms by some orders of magnitude. He seemed to be coasting easily while Harry found his broom to be in the vibrating, jerky phase, and Lisa had fallen somewhat behind.

They made straight for the goalposts, and Davies let go of his broom to throw the quaffle. Page had arranged himself sideways, so that he was halfway between two of the goalposts. Instead of aiming for the unguarded hoop, Davies did a strange curving toss, and Harry was startled to see the quaffle flying right at him. His hand darted out automatically to grab it, but it was a bit large and he fumbled slightly.

Seeing the goalposts approaching, he tried to go for the hoop behind Page, but the keeper punted the ball away and anyway, Harry suspected he would have missed even had he not been blocked.

The quaffle remained levitating some meters away from the goalposts, as if it had rolled away in midair. Harry flew over to retrieve it and then went back to where Davies and Lisa had regrouped some distance out of Page's earshot.

"Sorry," he said as he approached, aware that he wasn't performing so well.

"No worries," said Davies, who, Harry supposed, really didn't have anything to worry about.

The rest of the tryout went about as well. Davies attempted to assist Lisa and Harry in scoring a goal, but they were both unable to, and finally he just went on his own and managed to get past Page with some quick manoeuvring.

In the end Davies and the other original chaster, Stretton, both got their positions back, and a third year, Randolph Burrow, got the last position. Page also remained keeper, to nobody's surprise.

Defeated, Harry and Lisa returned to join the other first years.

"Too bad, mate," said Terry. "But good show. I couldn't even make it past the bludgers."

"Are you okay?" Lisa asked him. Harry looked him up and down and didn't see any cantaloupe-sized bruises.

Terry laughed. "Don't worry. Professor Flitwick fixed us right back up. Nobody even had to go to the hospital wing."

"You're all mental," said Michael. "I can't believe you would volunteer to go near a big metal ball that's actively trying to put a dent in your head."

"You came to watch, didn't you?" said Lisa.

"Watching is totally different," said Michael. "Watching is great fun."

"I couldn't really see much," Oliver admitted.

"That's why you need _these_ ," said Stephen, tapping the bulging sky blue goggles on his head. "Omnioculars."

"I've never seen omnioculars like that," Lisa said, bumping Harry aside to peer at Stephen's strange accessory.

"Well they're mini-omnioculars technically. But the idea's the same. You can't record much but you can zoom in on the action and everything's lit up for perfect visibility," Stephen explained.

Harry thought about his own spectacles, and wondered if they had a similar function. He tried pushing them up his nose, as one usually did when hoping for better visibility.

He wasn't disappointed. Though everything appeared sort of grainy, his field of vision increased drastically and where he could see only dim shadows before, he could make out the features of older students, and even see the distinct lines of the Quidditch pitch behind them now. He wished he had discovered this feature ten minutes ago, though realistically it would not have made much of a difference in the tryout results.

"Being on the team would have been brill," Terry was saying, "but also a lot of work. They practice every day at an ungodly time for hours, you know, and they still have to do schoolwork on top of it. So I'm sort of glad we all failed."

"Looking on the bright side, huh?" Lisa murmured.

But Terry had had a point. The volume of homework picked up drastically after the first week. If they thought McGonagall and Snape had been bad, now they had to contend with effectively self-studied essays for Binns, boring worksheets on wand movements for Flitwick, and frustratingly vague writing prompts from Quirrell.

Harry, having failed to make it onto the Quidditch team, ran out of ready excuses for Professor Quirrell soon enough, and had to accept another evening meeting with the man the next week.

He decided to try the Enemy's Curse on his own again, just in case. Since it was not technically illegal, and didn't even cause damage to objects, he figured it would be fine to cast it in the usual empty classroom he used for practising.

Funnily enough, he had no problems casting it now. All it took was the image of Professor Quirrell whispering the sinister mantra for the Evil Eye, sending a shiver down his back, and the blue beam erupted with alacrity from the end of his wand. He cast it at the wall several times for good measure, just to make sure he could.

The sound of heavy footsteps reached his ears, and Harry quickly looked around for something else he could plausibly be doing instead of questionable and possibly dark magic. He dug around in his pockets but found only his remembrall.

A moment later, Vince walked into the room. Harry tried not to look guilty or anything, and acted as if he had just been, well, looking at his remembrall, which seemed a bit stupid.

"Oh hey, Harry," said Vince. "Look, I have one of those too now."

He produced a remembrall that was slightly larger than Harry's, and which had a filigreed golden band around the equator.

"Where did you get it?" Harry asked.

"Draco got it off that wimpy Gryffindor, Longbottom," said Vince. Harry frowned.

"You mean he just, took it from him?" Harry asked. Vince nodded and shrugged. "And now you have it?"

"Draco threw it away, but I went to go find it," Vince explained. "Seemed useful."

Harry couldn't imagine why somebody would bother to steal something, and then just toss it. Draco Malfoy made no sense.

"You don't think Neville might want it back?" he asked.

"What's he gonna do about it?" Vince said. Well, that was a good point. Harry couldn't imagine Neville Longbottom actually reporting Malfoy, or going up to him and settling it one-on-one.

Harry went for a different angle. "If you give it back to him at charms club I bet he'd be grateful," he said.

"Oh, you mean, he'd owe me one," said Vince, looking thoughtful. "I suppose so."

He put the remembrall away in his pocket and traded it for a familiar white magazine. It was another issue of _Martin Miggs._

"So what's this one about?" Harry asked.

Vince squinted at the cover, which looked more or less the same as that of the previous week's issue, as if in deep concentration.

"Something about music, I think. Cellos. Ah, probably the Strange Sisters!" he said.

"Strange Sisters?" Harry asked.

"It's like the Weird Sisters, but they didn't want to use the real name I guess," Vince explained. Harry didn't know who the Weird Sisters were either, but decided it wasn't important.

"Is there a plot summary or something?" Harry asked, moving closer to see if there was something he'd missed. But no, only Martin Miggs's awkward smile and slouchy beret greeted him. "Have you read it before?"

Vince shook his head. "It's new, just came out yesterday," he said.

"I don't get it," Harry finally said. "How do you know what's going to happen, then?"

"I'm reading it," Vince said.

"Without opening it?"

"It doesn't work as well," said Vince, "but I can still tell the main points. Can't you? Here, get a better look at it."

He shoved the magazine into Harry's hands. "I don't think looking at it is going to help," Harry said. "Can you do that with all books? Just, er, read them without opening them?"

"Not all books," said Vince. "Some are easier than others. Our textbooks are pretty hard."

"Let's go to the library," Harry said, eager to test out Vince's perplexing talent. Was it really what it seemed to be?

"What?" Vince said, bemused. "Why?"

Harry handed _Martin Miggs_ back to him and steered him into a chair. "After you finish this."

Vince shot him another confused glance before turning to the comic and quickly becoming engrossed. Harry produced his remembrall again, some legitimate use for it having just occurred to him.

He set it down on a chair and pointed his wand at himself, sketching in a careful spiral, in and out. " _Structuram vedo,_ " he intoned. Nothing happened, which was better than what had occurred the first few times, when sparks had shot out of his wand towards his own eye.

The structure sight charm was supposed to allow the caster to see spell structures, as the name suggested. According to the _Compendium,_ an expert at the spell could eventually see each of the many hundreds of basic spell functions as different colours and shades, though the inexperienced caster was at first likely to see only a uniform, silver or white light. Harry would be glad to see anything at all.

He guessed that his wand movement was still incorrect. There had been a description and an animated diagram in the book, but it had been rather complicated.

"I'm done," said Vince, after far too short of a time. Harry shoved his uncooperative wand and remembrall into his pockets.

"Library then," he said.

"You take this," said Vince, giving him the magazine, as he had the previous week.

"Why?" Harry asked. "Don't you want it?"

"No, it's yours," said Vince. "I never had it, okay?"

"Okay," Harry agreed, bemused by Vince's insistence on not being associated with the comic. It wasn't as if it were some sort of contraband, or embarrassing to be seen with. Actually it seemed quite popular. Now that he knew what it was, Harry had begun to notice it everywhere. There were often various issues lying around in the Ravenclaw common room, and he had seen a whole stack of the things on Terry's nightstand.

"That's a lot of books," Vince said as they arrived at the library. Harry tried not to look at him too incredulously.

"It's the library," he said. "What did you expect?"

Vince shrugged, looking away. "Dunno."

"Wait, you haven't been here before?" Harry deduced suddenly. He counted on his other hand the number of times he had already had to come here for some assignment or other, and ran out of fingers before he got past the tally for Professor McGonagall. "How did you do your homework?"

"Homework?" Vince asked, and Harry almost gaped.

"You know, those essays we had to write? For classes?" And he remembered, distinctly, he thought, Vince claiming that he couldn't write. But that just could not be _right_.

Vince shrugged again. "Draco helped," he said.

By helped, Harry wondered if Vince meant that Draco had completed it all for him. However, he just couldn't imagine why the other boy would bother doing something like that.

"What was in it for him?" Harry asked.

"I owe him one," said Vince. "I owe him lots of ones."

Harry was still unsure what Draco could possibly be getting from the arrangement, but there were more important matters at stake. He walked up to the Divination shelf and picked a book titled _Xylomancy_ , which was something he had never heard of and was fairly confident Vince had never heard of either.

"Here, what's this book about?" Harry asked. He half hoped that Vince was just going to flip the book over or look inside for some kind of summary or preface, but instead he just stared intently at the utterly unfathomable title and matte green cover.

"Er, looking at the future with sticks. Dropping some sticks on the ground is supposed to make special patterns or something. I dunno, seems stupid," Vince said.

"Let me see that," Harry said, grabbing the book back. He opened it up and read the first few passages of the introduction, which was more than enough to convince him that Vince had adequately summarised the contents, if clumsily. Harry was startled to find that his fingertips were sweating a little where they pressed against the parchment pages, and that his heart had raced up into his throat some time ago without his notice.

This was incredible. This was impossible.

He shoved the book back into its place and grabbed another one. _The Fateful Word: Grammatica in the Past_. He had literally no guesses on what the book was even about, other than, well, divination.

"What about this one?"

"Why are you making me read random books?" Vince asked.

Harry did not understand how Vince did not recognise his own amazing talent.

"I just want to see how you read. It's, er, different from how I, how everyone else I've met reads," Harry said.

"Er, okay. This one is about how words can change what happens in the future. I think, depending on how you say something, people will act different," Vince told him. "What do you mean I read different from you?" he asked, looking on in confusion as Harry flipped through the tome in an attempt to verify his words. "You're reading the same way."

"I'm skimming," said Harry. "If I read the book it'd have to be like, well, this." He shut the book with a rather heavy thud and then opened it up to the first page. "Preface. As I write this book, the Fateful Word Effect is the most hotly debated topic in the entire field of Grammatology, and perhaps even all of Divination. Though in recent years its existence has, I should think, been established beyond a reasonable doubt…" Harry paused and looked up expectantly at Vince.

"Oh," said the large boy, blinking slowly, before he looked down at his feet. "You can get all that? I'm not, er, not that good yet."

"What do you _mean?_ " Harry demanded with some exasperation.

"Quiet in the library!" Madam Pince whispered very loudly, from across the room. Harry froze and quickly replaced the book on the shelves.

"Let's get out of here," he muttered, and ushered Vince down the aisle and nearest staircase.

"Let's go to lunch," said Vince.

It wasn't lunch yet, Harry was sure, but he figured the Great Hall was as good a place as any to continue their conversation.

There was already a smattering of students in the hall despite the lack of even any silverware set up. Harry checked the time and discovered that they were an hour early.

"Look it's Draco and Goyle," said Vince, pointing to the Slytherin table. Harry, seeing little other alternative, followed him.

"Where have you been all morning?" Draco demanded, upon seeing Vince. His gaze shifted doubtfully over to Harry's face, and then slid down to somewhere in the vicinity of his chest. "Oh, you. You know we don't have to wear the uniform on weekends, don't you?"

"I know," said Harry, who had not really given it much thought. His casual wear consisted of even more black robes. It hardly seemed worth even taking it out of his trunk. Draco, on the other hand, was clearly endowed with a more exciting wardrobe, and wore a light grey robe embroidered with shimmering vines.

Vince, who was also black-clad, though not in school robes, sat down, and Harry joined him. Draco had not stopped staring at him.

"What are you doing? This is the Slytherin table," he said.

"Is there a rule against that?" Harry asked. It would be a right stupid rule, if there was.

"Well," Draco began, and then paused. "I suppose not." He finally turned back to Vince. "Have you seen the Gryffindor point glass? Or better yet, Weasley?"

Vince shook his head.

"Oh it was glorious," Draco crowed. "Remember that supposed duel that I challenged him to? Dunce didn't even realise dueling is against the school rules. Walked right into Filch in the middle of the night. You should've seen his face! Looked like his whole family had died, all dozen of them, and he had to sit alone at the end of the table. Didn't stop him from stuffing his face like a boor though. Speaking of which, where were you? I cannot believe you missed breakfast."

"Didn't miss breakfast," said Vince. "Was early."

"Early?" Draco repeated. He glanced over to Goyle. "We went at what, eight? What did you get up so early on a Saturday for?"

Vince looked oddly uncomfortable, and the silence dragged, so Harry said, "We were studying."

"Studying? Early morning on a Saturday?" Draco said again. "Are you seriously converting _Vince_ into a Ravenclaw? That's—I cannot even begin..."

"Well he reads in an, er, interesting way," Harry said.

"He can read?" Draco said, looking a little astonished. Vince looked abashedly at his lap and Harry frowned.

"Of course he can," he said, "look," and he pulled out the only reading material he had on him, which was the _Martin_ _Miggs_ comic.

Vince looked up very suddenly and all the blood seemed to drain from his face. His mouth formed into a panicked "No!" but no sound came out at all. Harry held up the magazine awkwardly, seeing as it was obviously too late to put it back.

"You read that mud—muggleborn rubbish?" Draco demanded immediately.

Oh. Harry felt a little relieved that it was just _this_.

"Not really," he said coolly. "Terry loves it so I nicked one to see what it was about. Why, is it really bad or something?"

"It's written by a muggleborn," Draco explained, as if that were the most relevant thing upon which to judge a periodical. "Also the drawings are almost muggle—they barely move, and it's sub, er, subversive."

Harry wasn't sure either he or Draco knew what "subversive" meant, but he nodded anyway.

"Oh. Too bad then," he said. "But anyway, Vince can read you know? I bet he's never seen this comic in his life and he could tell you what it was about."

"That's hardly reading," said Draco dismissively. "It's just a comic. An infant could do that." He turned to Vince. "Last time I checked, you still cannot even get paragraphs."

"Can't," Vince mumbled, looking away.

Harry wondered what Draco was even talking about, and had to concluded that he must also have this same ability that Vince had, or perhaps a better one. However, he wasn't sure it was safe to ask about it.

His bemusement must have shown on his face, because Draco sneered suddenly. "What is it? Don't tell me you read like a mu—muggleborn."

Reading like a mudblood? Reading and writing making somebody a mudblood—it sounded awfully familiar.

"Maybe I do," Harry said, trying to sound casual and not at all defensive.

"You mean you had to memorise every single word, and read them one at a time? That must take an eternity," Draco said. Harry blinked. He supposed that that was sort of how one began to read, but sooner or later it became possible to skim texts or read whole sentences or even paragraphs at a time.

"Not exactly," he said. "Nobody literally reads the words one at a time. Not even muggles."

"And you write all your essays that way too?"

"Well how do _you_ write essays?" Harry demanded.

"There's a spell," said Draco. "Like the professors use for the board."

"What's the spell? Can you show me?" Harry asked, and Draco flushed slightly.

"I er, I can't do it _that_ well yet," he admitted. "I use a dicta-quill."

"Are those even allowed in exams?" asked Harry. He remembered exams from primary involving complete silence.

"Well, no," said Draco.

"So what do you do then?" Harry pressed. Draco frowned for some time before answering.

"I suppose then I'd have to write like, like a muggle."

"So you _can_ write. Like that," said Harry.

Draco's face lost its strange, uncertain look and he broke out into another sneer. "Well of course I can."

But Harry noticed that Vince and Goyle seemed rather surprised.

"But you," Draco said to Harry, "ought to learn to read and write like a proper wizard."

"How exactly is that, anyway?" Harry asked.

"Writing is like casting half a spell actually, and when you read it it's the other half of the spell. Magic is the purest kind of communication. If you're a true wizard you should understand everything the writer meant to say," Draco explained.

Later in the library, Harry tried very hard to find some kind of magical understanding in books, but was met with no success. He'd think Draco had been having him on, but for the fact that it had all started with Vince. There was definitely something to the idea of reading like a wizard, something different.

"How do you learn to read?" Harry asked Vince as they walked up to charms club together.

"Dunno," said Vince. "You just know, if it comes natural to you, or it doesn't."

He said it like reading was a sort of innate talent. Harry mulled over the unsatisfying thought until they made it to the crystalline rotunda and were promptly set upon by Elaine, who leapt up from her seat by her sister and practically sprinted across the room to meet them.

"You came! I mean, welcome back," she said with a beaming smile. "Harry! I saw your suggestion. That charm looks brilliant. It didn't win this week but I'm definitely gonna learn it so you lemme know if you need help, okay?"

"I'll definitely take you up on that," said Harry, somewhat disappointed but not surprised that others had not voted for the charm. "So what charm are we learning today then?"

"The human-revealing spell! Or well, just the revealing spell too, if you don't know that one yet," said Elaine.

A whoop sounded from behind them, and they turned to see the pink-haired Tonks strolling into the room. "Who picks the most wicked spells every time? That's right, me," she said.

"All your spells are straight off the Auror Academy list," said Elaine. "They're totally useless for normal people."

"Defence is dead useful," Tonks argued. "What if you get mugged by dark wizards?"

"I'll be sure to use the human-revealing spell while being mugged by dark wizards," said Elaine dryly. "They'll be so revealed that they run away screaming. Actually, regular revealing spell would probably be more useful there."

Tonks sighed theatrically and slumped down on a nearby bench. Elaine sniffed.

"Where's Gabriel?" she asked.

"Dating," said Tonks, rolling her eyes and making air quotes. "More like snogging."

"He picked a girl over charms? Traitor. Whatever. We'll wait a few more minutes for everyone to show up."

Cassius arrived just then, followed by Hannah and Neville. Then came Penelope and a tall, ginger boy in Gryffindor robes, who also had a prefect badge pinned to his chest. Close behind them was yet another prefect, this one a girl from Slytherin.

"Hey Penny, Percy. Hey Gemma," said Elaine.

"Where's Gabriel?" asked Gemma, upon giving the room a once-over.

"Snogging Dawlish in a broom closet," said Tonks.

"Shame, thought we might get the full set," Gemma said with a sigh.

"Can't be too predictable," Tonks told her, "or all the troublemakers will know to come out when it's charms club time."

"I still can't believe we all made prefect," said Gemma.

"I still can't believe Gabe made prefect," said Tonks.

Gemma made a face and turned to Elaine. "What charm are we doing?"

Elaine told her, and then decided they might as well officially start.

"So this is a variant of the revealing charm, only instead of revealing disguises on one target it just shows if there are any humans in a certain radius, and you can even figure out how many," she said. "The incantation is _homenum revelio,_ and you have to sweep your wand like this." She held out her wand at arm's length and turned about, tracing an arc.

"How does that have anything to do with the revealing spell?" Gemma demanded. "They don't have remotely the same properties!"

"They both reveal, don't they?" said Tonks.

"I think it's syntactical similarity," said Penelope. "Sort of like in Transfiguration."

"This is charms," Gemma protested.

"Who cares?" said Elaine. "According to my charm family book it's a variant, so that's that. So who doesn't know the revealing spell? I'll show you real quick."

All the first years raised their hands, and she herded them into a corner. Harry supposed that the revealing spell was probably related to the charm-revealing spell as well, but he'd never had occasion to learn it.

"Okay, so this spell is actually pretty rubbish. I mean, in real life. You can't tell if you got it right, or if there's just nothing to reveal. It's really easy, in principle, but could also be really hard. Depends on how hard the target is trying to hide, I suppose. Works on stuff that resists _finite_ though. Incantation is just _revelio_ , and you kind of flick your wand."

Elaine flicked her wand, pointing it at Harry. " _Revelio!_ "

She lowered her wand and stared in surprise, and Harry automatically reached up to touch his face. That wasn't it, though—it was his hair, he realised. He rolled his eyes up to see that his fringe was black, rather than the blond that he had almost got used to.

"Er, sorry," said Elaine. "I didn't think—"

"It's fine," said Harry. It wasn't as if anybody could recognise him. He had no idea why Petri had even bothered with renewing the charm on his hair after they had finished settling in Knockturn. Perhaps it had just been to avoid awkward questions from the likes of Silviu.

"That's perfect, though," said Elaine. "Maybe you can use the hair colour charm to test the revealing charm."

Harry did not actually know how to cast a hair colour charm, but he supposed it must be a variant of the colour-changing charm. Once Elaine had left them to their practice, he tried to cast it on himself.

Hannah immediately covered her mouth to stifle a giggle, and Vince and Neville broke out into grins. Harry tugged a bit of his fringe down to get a good look at it. It was canary yellow.

"It's hard without a mirror," he said. "Why don't you all try too?"

They hadn't learned the colour-changing charm in class yet, but Harry knew that it was an easy spell to get working, if difficult to master entirely. Even Neville managed to turn his sandy hair pitch black on the third try.

The revealing spell was also surprisingly easy. Harry wondered what good disguises were, if first years could cancel them with so little effort. He considered what Elaine had said about how hard the target was trying to hide.

"Wait, try it again," he told Hannah, who was practising on him. He charmed his hair yellow again, managing to get the shade somewhat more realistic, and concentrated on not being found out.

This appeared to have no effect, because Hannah managed to rid him of the disguise instantly.

"Again," he said, this time thinking about permanence while casting the colour-changing charm itself.

This time, it worked, and the charm resisted Hannah's attempt to reveal it.

"I thought I had it," she said.

"I tried to make my disguise more powerful," Harry told her. The relationship between a disguise spell and the revealing spell reminded him somewhat of the severing and mending charms, where the severing intent behind the severing charm could be strong enough to overpower an attempt at the mending charm.

Meanwhile Neville and Vince were taking a break, and Vince returned Neville's remembrall, which the Gryffindor took ecstatically. Immediately as he touched it, the smoke turned bright red.

"Oh no," he mumbled. "What did I forget now?"

"Your homework?" Harry suggested. Neville stared at the orb blankly.

"Can't remember," he finally said.

"Where did you get your remembrall?" Harry asked.

"My gran sent it as a gift," Neville said.

"Is your gran an enchanter?" Harry asked. Neville shook his head.

"I reckon she bought it somewhere," he said.

"Oh! That's right," said Hannah suddenly. She rummaged about in the rucksack she had brought and produced a roll of thin parchment. "Here, Harry, this is the catalogue for Wilma's Wools. They've got everything, not just wool, and they deliver owl orders within two days."

"Thanks," said Harry, having forgotten all about last week's knitting adventures. His needles were still under his bed in his cauldron.

His needles! He owed Elaine a sickle, or else. He patted his robe pockets hurriedly, and to his relief discovered that he had outsmarted himself, and placed a sickle there the previous week.

"Oh, thanks," said Elaine when he handed it to her. "How's the revealing spell going? You lot ready to move on to revealing humans?"

"Yeah," said Hannah, and nobody protested.

The human-revealing spell was a sight more difficult than the revealing spell. In particular, it was exceedingly odd in that it gave both false positives and false negatives. Casting it while the humans it was meant to be revealing were in sight was completely trivial—Harry felt like he had a long feather duster that swooped over all the people in the room, and rustled whenever it passed over somebody's head. Casting it with his eyes closed was another matter.

Elaine recommended that they walk around a bit while the others were casting, to put up more of a challenge. Harry found frustratingly that if he thought that Hannah, for example, was in front of him, that the spell would find her there even when she was actually behind him. Or if he did focus on finding her, it would fail to detect anybody at all.

"I think the trick is to want to find people without guessing that they're there, or where they are," Hannah said. "If you already think that they're in a certain spot, and they're not, then it doesn't work."

This was all well and likely, but not so easy to achieve. Still, at least they had all managed to get some reaction from the spell by the end of the hour.

Harry wasn't sure what he would ever need the spell for, anyway. It seemed far less useful than structure sight.

"Hey, Elaine, I really am interested in learning structure sight. Do you think we could meet up to practise it?" Harry asked.

"Oh sure. How about after lunch tomorrow? I usually go to eat around noon," Elaine said.

"Sounds good," Harry agreed.

"It's a date!" said Tonks, while Gemma and Penelope snickered.

"Don't say things like that!" cried Percy, looking scandalised.

"Don't be such an uptight arse," Tonks suggested.

"Club's over, go home," said Elaine, shooing them out the door, where they all made their way down the narrow spiral staircase in an awkward queue, before splitting to return to their respective house common rooms.

True to her word, Elaine stopped by the Ravenclaw table after lunch the next day and gestured for Harry to join her.

"Come on, I've got a great spot we can practise at," she said.

"Not the rotunda?" Harry asked.

"Rotunda's always booked," she said. "I think choir is in there most Sundays."

They went up the grand stair, and then up some more, and some more.

"Sorry, it's a bit of a walk, but it's worth it," Elaine said, as Harry huffed and struggled to catch up to her longer stride. "Anyway, where did you even find this spell? I'd never heard of it before you mentioned it and I'm in NEWT Charms."

Trust Petri to have dropped the name of a spell that was probably light-years above his level. Then again, he was normally good about only teaching Harry spells he could actually cast.

"My uncle," Harry said, finally getting somewhat more used to this response. "He's an enchanter."

"Really? Wicked! My mum's a charms mistress. She works for Cleansweep," Elaine told him. "I s'pose it makes sense we're both charms enthusiasts, huh? Phew. We're almost there; just a little farther."

They went up a steep staircase and emerged in a familiar burgundy hallway. Surely Elaine was not going to take him to the Gryffindor common room? Maybe it was different with other houses, but Harry had never seen a non-Ravenclaw in Ravenclaw Tower.

But no; instead, she took them two feet down the hallway, spun right back around, and led them back out onto the landing, where the staircase had transformed mysteriously into another corridor. This too was familiar. Were they going to the rubbish room that Draco Malfoy had been so intent on finding the other day?

Indeed, they stopped right in front of the tapestry with the dancing (or rather, not dancing) trolls. Instead of just staring at the wall intently or saying some sort of password, however, Elaine turned on the spot three times. A door poofed into existence.

"There's a wicked study room here," she said. "It has literally everything you'd ever need. You can even use it to conveniently borrow library books."

Harry waited with some scepticism as she pulled open the door, half-expecting to see the shambling piles of other students' discarded rubbish that Draco had implied were here. Then Elaine stepped through to reveal a small, tidy classroom, reminiscent of Professor Flitwick's, which was lined on all sides with ceiling-high wooden shelves that seemed largely empty. There was no lectern, only a neat assortment of desks and chairs.

All in all, it seemed fairly ordinary for how out of their way they had gone to come here.

"Come on," said Elaine, ushering him inside and then shutting the door. "Take a look at this. The room's already prepared with what we need," she said, making for the shelf directly across from them.

Harry hurried after her. She reached her hands into a shelf that was rather taller than Harry could see over and resurfaced with several books, which she slammed onto a nearby desk.

" _Refining the Structure Sight_ ," was the top one.

"There's a whole book on this spell?" Harry demanded, a little daunted.

"There's a whole three books on this spell," Elaine corrected, pushing the pile over in a way that would have made Madam Pince wince, or perhaps scream at her.

Indeed, the other two books looked also largely to be about the structure sight.

"Isn't this place brilliant? A thousand times better than trying to find a book you don't even know exists in the library, and Pince-free."

"Yeah it's neat," Harry agreed, a little preoccupied by how much studying this single spell might take him. Did he really have the time for that? Even those books would take him a while to read.

Well, if he read the muggle way.

"Hey, Elaine," he began, "is there some way to read books faster than word for word? Like one of my friends, he can just look at a book without even opening it and know what it's about. Said it was wizard reading."

"You're such a Ravenclaw," said Elaine with a bark of laughter. "Sometimes it does just happen that you can sort of, get what a book is about before even properly picking it up, but it's kind of tricky. Dunno if it's even really possible with printed or auto-quill books. It's the old handwritten first editions that the writers really put their ideas into, you know? But we don't have to read all these books. They're just here for reference. Dunno 'bout you but I like to learn by doing."

And with that, she pointed her wand at Harry and said, _"Structuram vedo!"_

Harry reeled as his vision lit up silvery white. It wasn't painfully blinding like he had half-expected from reading the description of the spell, but it was hard to make anything out in any case. He couldn't even see the desk or the books that he knew were in front of him—everything was a nearly uniform grey, with no indications of depth.

"Er, I didn't realise we were casting it on each other," he said.

"I read that it helps to have somebody else cast it at first," said Elaine. "Well, do you see anything?"

"Everything's grey," he informed her. She sighed.

"Yeah, that's what I thought. No idea how to make all the magic look different, or not block out your regular sight yet."

Harry frowned. "Wait, you're actually just casting this on me so you don't blind yourself, aren't you?"

Elaine laughed sheepishly. "Well, maybe. Don't worry, you can cancel the spell with _finite_. But you know, it's really hard to get the right wand movements when you can't see. _Finite._ "

Harry blinked rapidly as his regular vision returned. He rubbed at his eyes with the back of his hand. "That was odd," he muttered. "I can't even get that much to happen, though. Mine just doesn't work."

"Can I see your wand movement?" Elaine asked. Harry demonstrated. "Looks good enough, though I think the last swirl can be a bit tighter. The focus behind the charm's a bit tricky, though. It's sort of like with the human-revealing charm we did yesterday. You need to focus on seeing your surroundings."

Perhaps that was the problem Harry had been having before. He had always been focusing on some enchanted object whose structure he wanted to see.

He pointed his wand at Elaine. "So can I cast it on you?"

She chuckled nervously. "Well, I s'pose that'd be fair," she agreed.

" _Structuram vedo!_ "

Elaine recoiled a bit, suggesting that something, at least, had happened. She straightened out a moment later and gave a thumbs up.

"It worked. Well, about the same as mine. Can't really see much," she said.

"What now?" Harry asked.

"So according to this book," said Elaine, tapping the first book on the desk, "you can practise refining the spell by tuning out certain sorts of magic, like by trying to ignore weak or short-term spells."

"I don't think that's going to work here. I bet Hogwarts is long-term spells all over, and that's why we can't see anything," Harry pointed out. Also, he realised somewhat belatedly, his own spectacles were probably heavily charmed, and were in effect blocking his vision. He quickly removed them and set them on a nearby desk.

"That's a good point," Elaine muttered. "So let's just do the reverse. Tune out long-term magic."

Doing that was more difficult than it seemed, as Harry found it unnatural to think of less-powerful magic as brighter than more-powerful magic. If one tried to think of it purely in terms of duration, all magic, however, long-term, had some sort of expiration date, so without preexisting knowledge of how long this or that spell ought to last, the tuning was very inexact.

"I still don't see anything," Harry said after the tenth or so time Elaine had attempted to block out everything except a simple colour-changing charm on one of the desks. "Maybe it'll be easier if we cast it on ourselves?"

"Maybe," she said.

Harry tried the spell on himself and was again plunged into a sea of silvery light. An idea suddenly came to him—why couldn't he cast the spell again while it was already active? That would at least cut down on the cancellation spells needed between attempts.

Then again, casting it on himself a second time, he could hardly tell if it had worked or not. Everything still looked the same, namely uniformly bright. He attempted to turn and look around, but found his balance precariously compromised, and so elected only to move his head. Something in a different shade of grey caught his eye. It was somewhere to his right, he thought, but otherwise it was impossible to place the location without any kind of depth perception. There was a lumpy, dark oval, which presently lightened until it became rather invisible again, though Harry thought he could see flickers of tone or even colour there every few seconds.

Now that he tried it, in fact, he thought he could see flickering in the corner of his eye whenever he focused on a single spot. Perhaps if he focused there, and cast the charm again...

The ordinary, if blurry world of colours and objects came back into view and Harry sighed, rubbing at his temples.

"This is tricky," Elaine said. She was flipping through one of the books. "Not helpful. Everything after the first chapter assumes you're able to do this tuning out thing. I'm getting a headache from looking at all this magic."

Seeing that Elaine was clearly ready to call it a day, Harry said, "Thanks for your help. I'll stay here a bit longer."

"Good luck," Elaine said before slipping out the door.

Harry thought he had an idea as to what he had seen earlier. He cast the spell again and then immediately looked down at his wand. Indeed, there was a dark spot in the grey, which lightened and then disappeared within a moment. Wands had all sorts of long-term, complex enchantments on them. If he could distinguish his wand from the surroundings, that would be a good start.

Unfortunately, he couldn't seem to get past the phenomenon where his wand vanished moments after he cast the spell, and eventually gave up as the irritation in his eyes escalated to a stabbing pain. He collected his glasses and one of the books and made for the exit.

Before he reached the door, however, the book wrenched itself out of his hands and flapped through the air like a bird until it reached its original shelf, where it landed with a thump. Harry took that to mean that he was not permitted to remove it from the room. He resolved to come back later, as there was no way he would be reading anything right now with his headache.

As he left, the door vanished behind him. Suddenly struck by a thought, he spun around three times, thinking about the room with other people's rubbish that Draco had been searching for.

The door reappeared, and Harry pulled it open, grinning as he was met with an entirely new room, this one gargantuan, with a vaulted ceiling like a cathedral. As promised, it was full of precarious towers of stuff. He saw countless dusty cloaks, books, bits of parchment, broken toys, hats of every description, and even jewellery strewn about atop piles of cracked and rusted furniture. Harry didn't think he'd seen ever seen so many broken things in one room, and, given that he'd regularly seen inside Dudley's second bedroom at 4 Privet Drive, that was saying something.

He glanced around for some non-dysfunctional souvenir that he might bring back, and his eye caught on something shiny in the corner. It was underneath a large, raised armoire with one of its legs broken off. He shuffled over to it and saw that it was a round, handheld mirror. Casting a quick spell-revealing charm, which told him that it was heavily enchanted, but not cursed, he deemed it safe enough and picked it up.

Catching a glimpse of Professor Quirrell's pale, turbaned visage, he dropped it almost immediately and whirled around, but of course there was nobody there. A moment later rational thought reasserted itself and he figured that the mirror was a foe glass, like the one Petri kept in what passed for the parlour of their coffin. He took another look. As with Petri's foe glass, this one did not reflect him at all, and showed only his enemies. Professor Quirrell, while a little blurry, was in full colour, which meant that he was nearby and threatening. There were some other indistinct shadows in the background. Petri seemed to have faded from Harry's list of enemies, he noted dubiously, and also Silviu was distinctly absent. Perhaps the glass was faulty. It had after all been lying in a pile of rubbish.

He pocketed it anyway and returned to the Ravenclaw common room to finish up some homework. Tomorrow, he reflected glumly, was Monday again and that meant new homework, most likely, and worse, much more of Professor Quirrell than he cared to see. It was bad enough that they had Defence nearly every day; the after-hours meeting, or lesson, or whatever it was, that Harry had been coerced into attending made it positively dreadful.

Defence Against the Dark Arts wasn't so bad, if one discounted the part where Professor Quirrell managed to make no sense whatsoever and contradict himself multiple times while lecturing on how curses differed from other spells. Harry thought the single-page treatment in the textbook was more informative, which was just depressing. At least the professor had no opportunity to pay Harry any extra attention during the lesson.

That evening was another story. Professor Quirrell missed dinner entirely, so Harry had some reprieve with his roast chicken and potatoes before he had to trudge up to the third floor.

When he knocked on Professor Quirrell's office door, there was no response. Just as he was wondering if it would be acceptable for him to consider it a no-show and leave, he was suddenly assaulted by a pungent garlic odour and with it, the sight of the professor coming around the corner. It was the wrong corner, Harry thought. He must have come from beyond the door that was mysteriously out of bounds. Harry had asked around, but even the prefects did not know why the left-hand side of the corridor had been decreed forbidden. Apparently, it had happened suddenly after the winter holidays last year, with no accompanying explanation.

"Mr P-Potter, g-good evening," said Professor Quirrell, and Harry immediately felt the onset of a headache. There was no way at this point that it was a coincidence that his head hurt in the man's presence, but according to Petri it had nothing to do with vampirism. He wondered for a paranoid moment whether Professor Quirrell had somehow managed to curse him already on his very first day at Hogwarts, but then dismissed the idea. What reason could he have had to do such a thing?

What reason did he have now to do whatever it was that he was doing? Harry stepped back to allow Professor Quirrell to pass him and unlock the office door. "Good evening, sir," he mumbled.

Professor Quirrell held open the door and waved him inside. "I was, I was thinking," the professor began, "Y-you might want to learn some stronger spells. Say, dueling spells, maybe, so you can hunt down that vampire."

Harry frowned, something having just occurred to him. "But sir, why can't I just report it to the aurors?"

Professor Quirrell looked quite surprised. "Why, why _didn't_ you report it to the aurors? I assumed you did, and, and they did nothing."

It was awkward to have that escape strategy turned around on him, and Harry wasn't sure how to respond for a moment. He finally went with the truth. "I er, didn't think of it until just now."

"It's probably too late now," Professor Quirrell said. Somehow, even though he spoke very solemnly, Harry got the impression that he was actually rather amused. "Even if you don't end up seeing that v-vampire ever again, you c-could have some, some peace of mind if you knew how to d-defend yourself."

Unfortunately, Professor Quirrell did have a good point. Hadn't Harry already found himself in multiple situations where it would have been nice to know some more offensive spells than the fire-making or severing charms, which literally did not even count as jinxes? He knew the Enemy's Curse, he supposed, but he still wasn't confident he could trust it to work without an actual enemy in mind.

"Like what kind of spells?" he asked.

"Did you practise the Enemy's Curse?" Professor Quirrell asked.

"I couldn't think of an enemy," Harry lied.

"Oh, of course," said Professor Quirrell, though he sounded rather surprised. "But, that's easily remedied. Have you, have you heard of a foe glass?"

In fact, Harry had the one from the rubbish room in his pocket, and he supposed it would have worked to identify his enemy for him, had he had doubts. He remembered that he had a question about it, and so he took it out and showed it to Professor Quirrell, carefully not looking into it. He had no desire to see how terrifying the professor's face would look up close in its twisted, high-definition mirror world.

"I have one right here. I think it's broken, though. I can't see anything in it," he said. "Not even the vampire."

"Vampires aren't visible in silvered mirrors," Professor Quirrell said, immediately diagnosing the problem. He took the offered glass and peered into it. Then he glanced quickly at Harry, as if startled, before his expression smoothed out again. "P-perhaps this one really is broken, though."

"You don't see anything either, sir?" Harry asked, the gears in his mind already whirring as the professor shook his head. The foe glass probably was functional, after all, if Silviu was meant to be absent. That meant that Professor Quirrell was lying. It didn't take much of a leap of logic to suspect that Professor Quirrell had seen Harry in the mirror. The man obviously had it out for him for some reason.

But it was impossible to "eavesdrop" and find out another person's enemies by looking into the mirror at the same time, so why had Professor Quirrell bothered to lie? It didn't make any sense.

"Perhaps we should try a different c-curse," the professor said, returning the foe glass, which Harry pocketed again.

Harry nodded and waited, all ears for this new curse.

"It's c-called the c-conjunctivitis curse. It makes the target's eyes swell swell painfully so they c-cannot open them. G-good on vampires since they use their eyes to cast magic. And there's no c-counter-c-curse. You have to drink a p-potion," Professor Quirrell explained.

Actually, that did sound very useful, and the lack of countercurse meant it might actually be effective against the likes of Silviu.

"The incantation is _oculi tumescunt._ I will c-conjure something and show you. _Serpensortia."_

Professor Quirrell twirled his wand and a garden snake flopped out of the tip and landed on his desk. He promptly cast the curse at it—evidently the wand movement was a very simple forward jab.

Harry did not see anything happen, exactly—the snake's eyes were rather small—but a few moments after the curse hit the reptile raised its head slightly flicked its fork tongue in agitation.

"Dark," said small voice, "Can't see. Pain! Danger!"

"Is it talking?" Harry blurted.

"If it didn't talk, how would you know if the curse worked?" said Professor Quirrell sensibly.

"It's not sentient is it?" Harry asked, just in case.

"It's conjured," said Professor Quirrell simply, and Harry nodded. Magic could not create will, only an approximation of it. As the curse could not be easily cancelled, Professor Quirrell had to vanish the snake a moment later and conjure a new one for Harry to practise on.

Harry was not exactly sure what he should be imagining, as he was not well-acquainted with the anatomy of snake eyes, but he supposed "can't see" and "pain" were probably in the right direction.

" _Oculi tumescunt!"_ he cried, trying to make a controlled jab. Nothing happened. He tried a few more times with a similar lack of results.

"You need intent," said Professor Quirrell. "Perhaps..."

He banished the garden snake and conjured a rather more threatening cobra to replace it.

"Attack him," Professor Quirrell suggested to the snake, and suddenly it shot off the table right at Harry, who stumbled backwards and found the small office now dangerously confining as his back hit the wall and crunched against some newspaper clippings.

Was this secretly some plot to "accidentally" kill him with a snake?

Harry tried to run at an oblique angle to avoid the bright ribbon of colour on the floor. How was he supposed to aim?

" _Oculi tumescunt! Oculi tumescunt!"_

At least now, there was definitely some kind of magic coming out of his wand, but he kept missing the snake as it came at him. After another circuit around the office he finally wised up and aimed a foot ahead of it, striking true as it slithered up to meet the curse.

The snake continued to pursue him, apparently not much hindered.

"Stop," Professor Quirrell said, and the snake obligingly stopped. Harry moved as far away as he could get from it and then paused as well to catch his breath and calm his thudding heart. "It seems to have worked."

Harry had some choice words pent up for the professor, but decided to keep them to himself. That hadn't been much worse than anything Petri might have done to motivate him, he supposed. Instead, he said, "It worked? How? I wasn't really thinking about anything."

"Curses are different from ordinary charms," Professor Quirrell said, and Harry hoped this wasn't going to be a repeat of the disorganised morning lesson. "The key distinction is the importance of willpower. A curse brings the caster in direct conflict with the target, so it will only work if the will to inflict the curse is more forceful than the target's will to resist. Put simply, you must _mean it_."

That made sense, Harry supposed. It was also nothing like what he had heard earlier that day from the same man. "That's not exactly what you said in class, sir," he said, feeling a little petulant.

"It's not the most standard view," said Professor Quirrell, "but I personally think it is the correct one."

"I see, sir," said Harry. "Can I try again, er, without the attacking snake?"

"Of course," said Professor Quirrell, and obligingly conjured a less-threatening specimen.

Later, walking back to Ravenclaw Tower just before curfew, new curse under his belt and an agreement to meet every Monday evening, Harry realised suddenly that Professor Quirrell had made it through his entire explanation without stuttering once.


	27. Friend

Each time they met, Professor Quirrell would start Harry on another useful curse or hex, and they all seemed to come to him quite naturally. At least, he could make more progress on them in an evening than he'd made on his transfiguration spells all term. Perhaps it was just the nature of personal instruction that facilitated learning. In Charms class, they had already spent an untold number of weeks studying the swish and flick wand movement and breaking down the incantation of the levitation charm. It wasn't the easiest charm ever, but Harry hardly remembered doing much more than reading its compendium entry and then practising it repeatedly in order to learn it.

Harry wasn't sure anymore that Professor Quirrell had put any sort of curse on him, after so long without incident. He had jumped to that conclusion at first because it was the only reason he could think of for why the man had used the Evil Eye spell. But after finally asking him for some help with the structure sight charm, which he and Elaine had still made little progress on after so much time, Harry discovered that Professor Quirrell had never even heard of it.

Before Harry knew it, October was coming to a close, and he was finding out first-hand the downside of learning so many spells in so short a time. Namely, he was already forgetting the older ones.

"Look, I'm going to make house scarves for all my friends, and it won't be boring because I've got friends in all the houses so I can alternate," Hannah was saying as they lounged about in Harry and Vince's favourite empty classroom, which had become a common practice space for the first years in charms club. Hannah had even decorated it with all the cross-stitch art she had made in the process of mastering the knitting charm and its alternative uses.

Presently she had set up a pair of knitting needles in a complicated arrangement of six spools of cycling yarn, and was directing them imperiously with her wand like the conductor of an orchestra. Slowly but surely, the lower paws of what would presumably be a rearing golden lion appeared against a backdrop of maroon.

Harry had somehow still not managed to get around to owl ordering himself any yarn, and he hadn't touched his needles since the first week.

"I need to practise that," he muttered to himself. "And the revealing charm, and _sonorus..._ " Not to mention that he still had the exercises Petri had assigned him. He still hadn't finished even the first one.

"I honestly don't remember most of the spells we talk about," said Hannah. "There's just too many and we don't spend all that much time on them. You just have to stick to the ones that you think are useful."

Harry knew intellectually that that made sense, but he didn't want to give up on any of his hard-earned knowledge. Was this the reason why adult wizards often seemed to use only a few spells in their day to day lives? It was disappointing and he refused to become like that.

"Maybe if I assign a day for practising each one every week, that'll work," he mumbled, and took out a piece of parchment to write down all the spells he he had already learned or begun working on in his first two months at Hogwarts. The list was long, simultaneously depressingly and impressively so. Only three of the spells on the list had come from class—the rest had been acquired through his extracurricular pursuits.

"Ravenclaws," said Neville, shaking his head. "I can barely remember how to do the levitation charm."

"You're joking, right?" Harry said, looking up. "I swear I can recite the entry in the _Standard Book of Spells_ by now, we've gone through it so many times. I dunno why Professor Flitwick still hasn't had us cast it in class yet so we can finally move on. It's criminal."

"Remember what he said about that Barrufio wizard getting a buffalo on his chest?" Neville asked. "Something like that's probably going to happen to me."

"He's only told the story a thousand times," Harry muttered. "You'd have to be pretty distracted to get such an unrelated result, though, even if you said the incantation wrong. It probably just won't work as well. Maybe it would work anyway. You know adults sometimes don't even say the incantation at all, right?"

Harry didn't think Petri had ever vocalised a single " _accio_ " in his presence, despite his propensity for using the spell every ten seconds.

"Really?" asked Neville.

"Isn't your gran a witch?"

"Well, she doesn't use magic much around the house," said Neville.

"You mean she actually uses her hands to get things?" Harry asked, as if mystified. Neville gave him a funny look, and Harry gathered that maybe there _were_ witches and wizards who did not use their wands as a portable tractor beam. "My uncle," he explained, "he summons things even when they're two feet away."

"Seems like a lot of effort for nothing," said Neville.

Harry frowned, having never really thought of it that way. At what point did using magic become more difficult than doing something physically? He had always considered magic to be a sort of panacea for mundane worries, which was rather silly actually, because he knew from first-hand experience how it could cause its own suite of problems.

But obviously, casting the summoning charm was for Petri at least as instinctive as moving his limbs. Neville had a real point, however, that it wasn't exactly an easy charm. Harry could still barely get it to work at the best of times. He wondered how many years it would take before he got that proficient at it.

"My dad does that too," said Hannah. "Drives my mum up the wall. Oh no, no, bugger!" She waved her wand frantically and her knitting clattered onto the chair she had been using as a makeshift workbench. Putting her wand to the side, she went to untangle the mass of threads manually.

"Are those going to be Christmas presents?" Neville asked her.

"Christmas isn't for months," said Vince.

"Yeah they are," Hannah confirmed. "I'm starting now because they take a long time even with magic. You should all expect one."

"I thought Christmas presents were supposed to be a surprise," said Neville.

"I hate surprises," said Hannah. "Better to know so you can plan ahead. I mean, what if someone already has a dozen scarves and doesn't want another one? I need to know these things."

"I don't have any scarves," said Harry. Instead, he had the hot-air charm, and whatever atmospheric charms Petri used to keep their coffin at a comfortable temperature all year round.

"You're weird," said Hannah, and nobody disagreed.

" _You're_ weird," Vince told Hannah. "Forget Christmas. Halloween is tomorrow."

"Who cares about Halloween?" Hannah said. "It's a horrible holiday. Ghosts come out everywhere and do creepy things."

"There's going to be a feast," Vince said firmly. "A special feast with extra sweets."

"Maybe Professor Binns will take the day off," Harry said hopefully.

"Maybe he'll be extra boring to torment us more," Neville suggested.

Professor Binns, unfortunately, did not take Halloween off, nor did he give any indication that it was anything more than another ordinary Thursday. On a positive note, Professor Flitwick finally decreed them ready to attempt the levitation charm.

Harry took advantage of the chaotic practical to work in some long-overdue practice at the animation enchantment. He decided that the animation in question would be to float up and stay in place, exactly as if it were the levitation charm. It was a sort of movement, and Harry saw no reason why he couldn't choose that movement instead of some other one.

So, ignoring the swish and flick that Professor Flitwick had spent a ridiculous amount of time drilling into their heads, Harry executed a by-now automatic swish-twirl and murmured, _"Locomotor deleo."_

His feather floated up into the air and stayed there, right up until Hermione said, at the top of her lungs, "Hey, how did you do that? That wasn't even the right wand movement!"

Harry cringed and the feather drifted lifelessly back onto the desk. It was too late. Professor Flitwick was already coming their way.

"Oh, look!" the diminutive professor cried excitedly. "Good work. Look here, someone's got it already. Five points to Ravenclaw! Could you demonstrate again?"

Harry thought Professor Flitwick had done an admirable job of not mentioning his name, which he had probably forgotten again.

Now that everybody's eyes were on him, Harry elected to cast the actual levitation charm. " _Wingardium leviosa!"_

His feather floated up and Professor Flitwick clapped his hands together.

"Excellent!" he said.

"That's not what you did before," Hermione whispered, though still rather loudly.

"I was practising something else," he told her. "I already know the levitation charm. Obviously."

Hermione huffed for no apparent reason and turned to focus intently on her own feather. She executed a precise swish and flick and managed the charm perfectly, earning Gryffindor five points as well.

Harry blinked bemusedly and then returned to his animation enchantment. Hopefully now he could practise in peace.

No such luck. Now that Hermione had proven her own mastery of the charm, she began watching him again.

"Is that a variant of the animation charm?" she asked.

"Not exactly. It's an enchantment. It's supposed to," he paused and turned back to his feather, almost surprised to see that it was still floating even though he had lost concentration. "Well, it's supposed to do that. Move on its own. Wait, let me try again."

He cancelled his charm before reapplying it. It failed twice more before he managed to get it to stick again. "I think I'm getting it. Finally."

"Enchantments, I've read about those," said Hermione. "They last indefinitely. But they're supposed to be super advanced. Where did you learn it?"

"My uncle," Harry said. "He's an enchanter."

"Oh. Does that mean you learned spells before Hogwarts?" She looked rather worried, and Harry guessed that she might think she was behind, which was ridiculous.

"A few," he said. "Mostly theory."

Professor Flitwick, as it turned out, was sharper than he seemed, and stopped Harry on the way out, waving him over to his desk.

"Marvellous animation enchantment there," he said, grinning shrewdly in a way that reminded Harry uncomfortably of Nalrod Snipseed. "I see you've been doing some extracurricular studying."

"Er, a bit sir," Harry said.

"Not to worry," said Professor Flitwick. "I'm always thrilled to see my students developing a deeper interest in charms. I just wanted to let you know that my door is always open if you run into any questions."

Of course, Harry thought. Professor Flitwick was his head of house, and also a master of charms. Somehow, that fact had wandered off and got lost in the back of his mind over the course of the past few weeks.

"Actually, I was having some trouble with something, sir," he said. "It's the structure sight charm. It just makes everything grey. Would you have any advice about that?"

"Oh, structure sight? As a matter of fact, I have just the thing. My next class will be starting soon but why don't you come see me at my office hours later today?" said Professor Flitwick.

"I will, sir, if I can. Thanks. I need to be getting to Transfiguration anyway."

After Transfiguration, Harry checked the Ravenclaw notice board and saw that Professor Flitwick's office hours this week were right after History of Magic. He practically ran out of Binns's classroom the moment the lecture ended, darting past a confused Terry and an indignant Hermione, and barrelled down the nearest moving staircase before it had a chance to split from the landing.

He needn't have been in such a rush—Professor Flitwick was not even in his office when he arrived. Harry stood in front of the door feeling a little foolish and catching his breath.

"Oh hello there," said Professor Flitwick as he came around the corner a minute later. "Sorry I'm late. Come in. What was it, you said you needed help with the structure sight charm, correct?"

"Yes sir," said Harry, following him into his office. It was larger than Professor Quirrell's, but felt twice as cramped, with the majority of the space occupied by a wide oak desk, and tall bookshelves and filing cabinets lining the walls. There was a narrow gap between the shelves on the far wall that revealed a partially-blocked window, on the sill of which sat a somewhat wilted potted plant.

"It's a rather unintuitive charm, but the wandwork is simple enough. The easiest way to learn it is really just to have somebody else cast it on you, and try to emulate them," Professor Flitwick said, pulling up one of the cushioned chairs in front of his desk and gesturing for Harry to take the other.

Harry remembered that Elaine had mentioned much the same thing, but it somehow had not occurred to either of them that that meant the person doing the casting ought to have already mastered the charm. In retrospect, that should have been obvious.

"Ready?" said Professor Flitwick, and Harry nodded. " _Structuram vedi!_ " He watched with surprise as the professor waved his wand in a rather different and more complicated way than what he and Elaine had been doing. Had their wand movement been off the entire time? Harry thought the incantation sounded a little different as well.

Then he couldn't see anything but a kaleidoscope of colours. As he made an effort to focus, however, objects, if stretched and warped in a strange way, began to emerge from the mess and gain some coherency. He was fairly sure that Professor Flitwick was the gigantic bright splotch of oranges and golds that pulsated and swirled dizzyingly at the forefront of his vision. He still had no depth perception.

"How do you figure out what everything is?" Harry asked. Professor Flitwick chuckled.

"That's the hard part," he said. "Trial and error, mostly. In my spell I use yellow for static magic, red for kinetic, and blue for alteration, broadly. You can choose whatever colours and be as specific as you like. Are you familiar with spell classifications?"

"Sort of," said Harry. "I think I know the charms one you're using, sir."

"Oh, very good. Once you've got a good look at what everything ought to be like, you can try to cast the spell yourself and see if you can distinguish some of the magic," said Professor Flitwick.

Harry stared at the colourful vision for another minute before he decided that there was nothing more to gain from looking, and cast the cancellation charm on himself.

"Oh, _finite_ , excellent," said Professor Flitwick. "My, you do seem to know quite a few charms. May I ask if you've had a tutor?"

"Er, my uncle, sir. He's an enchanter."

"And you're following in his footsteps already, I see."

"I suppose," said Harry. "Sir, I was wondering, I noticed your wand movement isn't like the description in the _Complete Compendium of Charms_. And the incantation you used, too."

"Don't worry about that," said Professor Flitwick. "It was because I was casting the spell on you rather than myself. The extra wand movements help with focus."

"But I've cast it on someone else before with the normal incantation and movement," Harry said.

"Ah so you've got a partner in crime! And yes, that does work, but the alternate version is better suited to it."

"Yeah, I was practising with Elaine Frobisher. She's in Gryffindor," Harry said.

"The president of charms club, isn't she?" Professor Flitwick said, beaming. "One of my best NEWT students too. You're a member of charms club then?"

Harry nodded.

"Marvellous," said Professor Flitwick. "Well, go on, try the spell."

Harry pointed his wand at himself and tried the charm. Everything went grey and yellow, which was a huge improvement over just grey.

"I got yellow!" he said. "I mean, I see some yellow now too." It was a far cry from the level of detail that Professor Flitwick's charm had shown him, but he felt like he finally knew what he was doing. "Thank you, professor."

There was a knock on the office door then. Harry cancelled his charm.

"Oh, I'll get going then," he said.

"Did you have any other questions?" asked Professor Flitwick.

"No, that was all, thanks again, sir."

"You're welcome any time. Even if it isn't my office hours—just send me a note!"

Harry nodded and made for the door, holding it open to allow the older Ravenclaw student on the other side to enter.

He headed to the usual practice room and found Vince already there, playing some card game with Draco and Goyle. Given that they were all Slytherins, it was odd that they were here rather than in their common room.

As he entered, Vince glanced up and waved. "Harry, I was looking for you," he said. His entire hand of cards promptly exploded on him and singed one of his eyebrows off. Goyle guffawed and threw down his cards on the chair they had been using as a table, apparently having won.

"Good job at looking," Harry said, giving their game setup a sceptical once-over. Judging by the amount of soot on the floor, they had been at it for a while.

"Waiting," Vince amended. "Figured you'd come up here sooner or later. My mates need some help and I told them you'd be the one."

"Help with what?" asked Harry, glancing over to Draco. Draco was a hundred percent the brains of any operation involving this particular trio.

"We need a charm to unlock things," said Draco.

"Things?" Harry repeated.

"Such as doors," Draco clarified.

"So you need the unlocking charm," said Harry, laughing internally at the rather constipated expression on Draco's thin face. "You could ask Professor Flitwick," he could not resist adding. "He's always happy when students show extra interest in Charms."

"But you know the charm, don't you?" Draco said insistently.

Harry nodded. "What door do you need me to unlock?" Whatever it was, it sounded illicit.

"Er, could you just show me the charm?" Draco asked.

"Sure," said Harry, "but you'd owe me one, and I want to know what you're going to use it for. That's fair, isn't it?"

"You can't tell anybody else," said Draco, after a moment of consideration.

"Of course I won't," Harry agreed.

"The forbidden door, that one on the third floor," Draco told him.

"Alright, and you've got to tell me what you find," Harry said instantly, curiosity kindled. It hadn't occurred to him before to bother seeing behind the door for himself. Things were usually forbidden for a reason. But if Draco wanted to stick his neck out to find out, well, that was an entirely different matter.

"Fine," said Draco. He hesitated a moment, and then said, "My father says the headmaster might be hiding something really dangerous behind there."

"Dangerous?" said Harry sceptically. "In a school?"

"Remember, he said at the start of term that it's forbidden if we didn't want to die a horrible death. That sounds pretty dangerous to me," Draco argued. Harry remembered no such thing, but he supposed he had missed most of the announcements that evening on account of his trip to the hospital wing.

"And you want to go in there?"

"We're not going in," Draco said quickly. "Just looking. I was thinking, with the Halloween feast, all the teachers will be distracted."

Harry shrugged. "Whatever. So the unlocking charm goes like this. The incantation is _alohamora._ " He demonstrated the charm on the window latch, and to Draco's credit, he was a quick study and picked it up reliably after a few tries.

"You lot are really going to go to look behind a door instead of the feast?" Harry muttered to Vince, who shared a commiserating look with Goyle and then turned back to nod.

"Draco says we'll be done quick and have plenty of time to make it to the feast after," he explained, but didn't sound very convinced.

Harry, for his part, went down to the feast with the rest of the Ravenclaw first years, who claimed the far end of the table as usual. The Great Hall was decorated quite festively with black streamers, live (or at least animated) bats, and pumpkin and turnip lanterns with suitably demonic visages in place of the usual floating candles. The golden plates and platters had been replaced with polished silver. For some reason, there were no ghosts present, not even the house ghosts that usually skulked about, despite Hannah's claim that they featured prominently during this holiday.

"I can see my face in this," Terry said, peering at his plate. "How long do you reckon it took the house elves to get them this shiny?"

Harry looked into his own plate, but all he saw was the bright glare of reflected candlelight.

"Seems like a waste when we're just going to get it dirty again," said Anthony.

"By that logic you'd never clean anything," Lisa said. Anthony shrugged, wisely electing not to take the bait. Lisa looked a bit disappointed at the lack of ensuing debate, but cheered up quickly enough when all the food spontaneously appeared. A delectable, buttery aroma wafted immediately through the hall. Harry reached eagerly for a meat pie and some bread, after confirming that they were uninterested in escaping his grasp.

Out of habit, he glanced up at the head table, which was fuller than he had seen it since the first night. There was even a professor he'd never seen before, a skeletally thin woman draped in multiple semi-transparent shawls and wearing absurdly gigantic spectacles.

Professor Quirrell, Harry noticed, was conspicuously absent.

Harry was mentally calculating whether he had enough stomach room for another roll before dessert when the doors to the Great Hall flew open with a bang and the previously missing Professor Quirrell barrelled inside, panting like he'd run a marathon. He sprinted up to Professor Dumbledore on wobbly legs.

"Troll! In the dungeons! Thought you ought to know," he cried, before slumping forward against the table and then collapsing to the floor.

The hall erupted into pandemonium. Professor Dumbledore stood up and raised his wand, shooting sparks out of it with a bang.

"Prefects, lead your houses to their common rooms. Professors, with me," he said gravely.

Harry glanced towards the Slytherin table and confirmed that he did not see Vince, Draco, or Goyle anywhere.

He looked around helplessly. The prefects had moved to the front of the Ravenclaw table and were ushering everybody into a single queue so they could evacuate the Great Hall in an orderly fashion. Professor Dumbledore and his entourage of teachers had left already, leaving only a still-insensate Professor Quirrell who had been propped up against the head table.

Harry shook his head. He had no choice. In the chaos of students streaming up the grand stair, he broke away from the rest of the Ravenclaws and ducked behind the bend as they reached the third floor.

There was suddenly silence, as if he had stepped into a different world. The corridor was well-lit, threateningly so, and Harry's gaze darted around in agitation as he skulked down it, moving ever closer to the forbidden door.

His heart skipped a beat as voices reached his ears. The arc of the corridor saved him. He ducked into the side hall that led to Professor Quirrell's office, out of sight behind a suit of armour, just as an irate Professor Snape stalked past with three pale and chastised Slytherins in tow.

"You're lucky that it was me who found you," Professor Snape hissed darkly. "Anybody else and you'd be on your way to being expelled. Your parents will be hearing about this."

Harry held his breath, his heart threatening to explode, when Professor Snape paused for a moment and glanced suspiciously down the corridor. Then the man sneered and continued onward. Harry did not dare move from his hiding place for a full minute.

 _Stupid, stupid_ , he thought to himself. Why had he run off so foolishly on his own? What if the troll had found him? Harry shook his head. It was supposed to be in the dungeons and he was all the way up on the third floor. By that logic, though, there was no reason for him to try to alert Vince and his friends at all. They had got into trouble anyway, and almost dragged Harry down with them.

Just as he finally felt safe enough to stand up, the sound of more footsteps sent him right back into a crouch. He peered between the armour's metallic legs and saw Professor Quirrell coming around the bend.

Was he returning to his office? That would take him right past the suit of armour where Harry would stick out of its shadow like a sore thumb.

But no, it was even worse. Professor Quirrell paused at the edge of the corridor, glanced around nervously, and then took out his wand and waved it in a very familiar way.

" _Homenum revelio,"_ he muttered firmly.

Figuring that he was done for anyway, Harry stepped out from behind the armour, cursing internally. Why hadn't they learned the counter to this charm, rather than the charm itself?

Professor Quirrell whipped around with shocking alacrity to point his wand at Harry's chest, but slowly lowered it when he saw who it was.

"Mr P-Potter. What are you doing here? You should be with the rest of your house in your c-common room," he said.

Harry could not think of a plausible enough lie, and anyway Vince and his friends had got caught already, so he said, "My friends weren't at the feast, so I came to look for them."

"B-behind a suit of armour?" Professor Quirrell asked wryly, though rather than amused, Harry sensed the man seemed quite consternated, for whatever reason.

"Er, Professor Snape already found them," Harry said. Since Professor Quirrell had not instantly taken points or assigned detention, he went for a distraction. "Sir, are you all right? I mean, after, er, fainting."

"I'm q-quite all right. My c-constitution just isn't so g-good. Thank you for your c-concern. I still have to assign you detention, but let's make it Monday evening. The usual. How about that? You just return to your c-common room now," said Professor Quirrell.

Understanding the leniency he had been granted, Harry nodded, but then hesitated. "Sir, the troll is still out there. Maybe I can stay in your office with you until they catch it? I won't get in the way."

Harry flinched slightly as a flash of rage passed inexplicably across the professor's face, but it was gone a moment later and he looked thoughtful instead. Finally, he nodded. "Yes, yes, of c-course you're right. C-come with me."

To Harry's surprise, Professor Quirrell did not move towards his office, but instead continued to the end of the corridor, where the forbidden door was.

"I'm, I'm just securing the forbidden corridor," Professor Quirrell told him. "Wouldn't want the troll to g-get in here."

Harry nodded. Perhaps Professor Snape had run into Professor Quirrell on the way to the Slytherin common room and traded tasks with him.

Professor Quirrell was casting a variety of nonverbal spells at the door with complicated wand movements. Harry wondered how Draco had even thought it was plausible that a single unlocking charm was going to get him past real protective enchantments.

Harry frowned. Professor Quirrell was looking increasingly frustrated. Was there something wrong?

Finally, the professor lowered his wand and simply reached out to open the door. It swung out with a loud creak, and he peered behind it, before very quickly slamming it shut, looking even paler than he had before.

"What?" Harry blurted, rubbing absently at his forehead where he had felt a sudden stab of pain.

"It was unlocked," said Professor Quirrell in horrified wonder. Harry blinked. Had Draco actually managed to unlock the door before Professor Snape had come around? " _Colloportus_ ," said Professor Quirrell, and " _Protego horribilis."_

"Did somebody go inside?" Harry asked.

"No, no, it doesn't seem like it," said Professor Quirrell. "Let's go to my office."

"Alright," Harry agreed, somewhat confused. He was sure that Professor Quirrell was lying, somehow. Why had he been so shaken up by whatever was behind that door? It wasn't against the rules to ask, was it? "Why is that corridor forbidden, anyway, sir?"

Professor Quirrell looked at him thoughtfully as he held open the door to his office, still shaking a little. Finally he said, "The headmaster is storing something valuable there, and he has placed protections to keep out thieves."

"Why not store it in Gringotts?" Harry asked. The goblins obviously had a tough enough stance on thieves, and goblin magic was indecipherable to wizards.

"He trusts himself above anything else," said Professor Quirrell, which Harry supposed made sense, given how formidable of a wizard Professor Dumbledore was said to be.

"I see," said Harry. "How long do you think it will take them to find the troll, sir?"

"I don't know," said Professor Quirrell, sitting down behind his desk heavily. They remained in somewhat tense silence for a few minutes before the professor suddenly looked up. "Mr P-Potter, if I may ask, do you still have that, that book?"

What book? Well, he supposed that was easy—besides his textbooks, he had only one other book of his own at Hogwarts, namely the arcane book on sympathetic magic that Nic had sent him.

"The _Hieroglyphical Figures_ one? Yes, sir," he said a little cautiously.

"Would you bring it t-to our session on Monday?" asked Professor Quirrell, providing no context. Harry supposed it would be rather awkward to refuse.

"Er, sure, sir," he agreed. "What for?"

"I wanted to show you a new c-curse that's more, more challenging. Th-there are some useful passages in that book that might, might help you with it," said the professor. Harry nodded.

"What curse is it, sir? Maybe I can read up on it beforehand," Harry said.

"Y-you won't find this c-curse in the library. V-vampires have a special type of magic, and this c-curse disables it for a moment," Professor Quirrell told him.

"Sympathetic magic?" Harry demanded, and Professor Quirrell nodded, looking surprised. That was right. He hadn't been able to find anything on sympathetic magic in the library. "Why aren't there other books on it?"

"Research on sympathetic magic is highly restricted," said Professor Quirrell. "It's g-generally considered dark magic."

"Oh," Harry murmured. That explained some things, but opened up even more questions. Wasn't goblin metalwork also sympathetic magic? "Why?"

"G-good question. Why indeed?" said Professor Quirrell, but did not elaborate.

The hour grew late, and there was still no word on the troll. Eventually, Professor Quirrell concluded that the danger must be long past, and graciously walked Harry back to his common room, where they found Professor Flitwick, the prefects, and the Head Girl in wait, all half-furious and half-relieved to find that he was all right, and had been with Professor Quirrell the entire time.


	28. Owner

The spell to disable sympathetic magic was called the protection of blood, which sounded rather sinister to Harry, especially in context of vampires. But Professor Quirrell assured him that it actually had nothing to do with literal blood.

"It's difficult, and not a very useful curse, honestly, but it would help against a v-vampire," said Professor Quirrell.

"How does it work?" Harry asked.

"It's a bloodline curse," Professor Quirrell said, "You remember discussing those in class?"

Harry nodded. "It affects the target's whole family, and all their direct descendants. Does that count the people a vampire transforms?"

Professor Quirrell shook his head. "You misunderstand. The bloodline curse is cast on yourself." Perhaps in response to Harry's highly sceptical and half-horrified expression, he hurried to explain, "It's quite temporary. If the necessary conditions aren't met, it only lasts about ten minutes. Even if the spell works perfectly it will fade in days without prolonged contact with a close blood relative."

Harry wasn't sure he completely trusted that, but he nodded anyway.

"Right, so the curse is reactive. You cast it, and if your opponent—the vampire—attempts to attack with sympathetic magic, say, with his legilimency, the curse will target his magic and he won't be able to use it against you or your family any longer."

"What's legimancy?" Harry asked.

"Legilimency," Professor Quirrell corrected. "It's an ability of vampires to make a mental connection with their victim, to know and manipulate their thoughts."

"I see, sir. Can't wizards do something similar?" Harry had not forgotten that Albus Dumbledore could apparently read minds.

Professor Quirrell looked surprised, and did not respond for a moment, but eventually nodded and said, "That's right."

"But sir, I thought wizards couldn't do sympathetic magic," said Harry.

"Correct. Legilimency in wizards is based on entirely different principles," said Professor Quirrell.

Harry realised they had gone off on a tangent so he said quickly, "So how do you cast this protection of blood? And how do you know it worked?"

"I will demonstrate but I don't expect you to be able to cast it today," Professor Quirrell told him, which was new. Usually he only taught Harry curses that were fairly straightforward, and which he could grasp in a matter of hours.

To Harry's surprise, Professor Quirrell did not take out his wand, but only stood and moved in front of his desk. He raised his arms and closed his eyes. A soft golden light crackled across his body, covering it like a spiderweb, before dimming and fading.

"It's wandless?" Harry asked immediately, never having seen a spell that was meant to be cast without a wand.

"Yes, a very nontraditional curse," said Professor Quirrell. "One of many attempts by wizards to emulate sympathetic magic. Did you bring your book?"

Harry nodded, extracting _Secrets of the Hieroglyphical Figures_ from his enlarged pocket with some difficulty. He had torn out the flyleaf with Nic's letter and left it in his room, figuring he could mend it later if he needed it, but that meant he had to carry the book around in its expanded form.

"This book contains a most thorough treatment of sympathetic magic, if I recall correctly. Have you finished it?"

"Er, I read some of it, sir," Harry said, "but I didn't really understand it." At all.

"It is rather dense," Professor Quirrell acknowledged. "It has been awhile since I've accessed a copy. A friend sent you this, you said? You have interesting friends, Harry Potter."

He had almost whispered it to himself, but Harry caught it nonetheless. His name. He tried not to tense up, but it was impossible. This was impossible. He felt suddenly almost giddy with worry, and his ever-present Professor Quirrell-induced headache reared up all of a sudden and nearly blinded him with pain.

"Are you quite all right, Mr Potter? Perhaps we should end early?"

Harry would have been disappointed by this suggestion any other day, but he could muster no protest at the moment, shaken as he was.

_He said my name. But it's impossible. He said my name._

The same thoughts swirled about, chasing each other endlessly in his head.

"I'm not feeling so well," he agreed, after a long pause.

"It would be good for me to refresh my memory in any case, before I attempt to explain sympathetic magic to you. Would you mind terribly if I borrowed your book for now?" asked Professor Quirrell.

"Er, that's fine, sir," said Harry. It wasn't as if the book was doing him any good, lying under his bed in a cauldron. "Good evening, sir."

"Good evening, Mr Potter. I hope you recover swiftly. We'll continue next week," said Professor Quirrell.

Harry recovered his wits swiftly enough after he stumbled back to the Ravenclaw common room, and immediately wrote a panicked letter to Petri. Then he read over his chicken-scratch, felt foolish, and binned it before drafting another, more composed version, to be sent in the morning.

He didn't think it was truly a new development, anyway, that Professor Quirrell knew his name. Hadn't he suspected it to some greater or smaller degree all year? Nothing obviously untoward had happened yet. He needn't have practically run out of their lesson.

Still, it felt good to lie on his bed and enjoy a headache-free Monday evening. He could deal with the matter tomorrow.

But he did not see Professor Quirrell outside of class at all that week. Half their Defence lessons were cancelled, which was met with celebration, and the rest were substituted by the dour Professor Snape, which was met with groaning and moaning by everybody except the Slytherins.

Whatever his failings, however, Professor Snape conducted Defence lessons the same way he conducted his Potions lessons, namely practically. Harry was more than pleased at the opportunity to actually learn and use the disarming charm, which seemed dead useful. Given how few of his classmates actually managed any effect, Harry got the impression that the spell was above first year level, but he found it no more difficult than any of the charms they had practised in charms club. In fact, he was proud to note that Neville, who had partnered with him, was one of the only other people to get the spell properly by the end of the week.

Petri's reply letter arrived over the weekend with the unhelpful advice to carry on as usual, since he was not dead yet, and they would discuss the matter of the fidelius charm over the winter holiday. How reassuring. Harry crumpled it up and burned it.

Monday morning, when Professor Quirrell still failed to appear at the morning lesson, Harry began to worry a little, half for the professor but also half for himself. None of his classmates had any idea where their stuttering professor might be, so Harry finally mustered up the courage to ask Professor Snape.

"Er, excuse me, Professor Snape, sir," he said. Professor Snape, who had been organising a stack of essays on the lectern, did not look up for a long moment.

When all the parchment sheets had been straightened out, he turned with a cold, "Yes?"

"Would you happen to know when Professor Quirrell will be back?"

"No, I do not know," said Professor Snape, sounding very discontented.

"Where is he?" Harry tried.

"That is none of your concern," said Professor Snape. He was, comically enough, looking past Harry, and his eyes continually darted from side to side, as if trying but failing to focus on him. Every passing moment, he appeared to be getting increasingly frustrated.

"But sir, I was supposed to meet with him this evening," Harry pressed.

"He's ill," Professor Snape finally ground out. "What were you expecting? Some sort of conspiracy?"

Harry decided not to press his luck any further and hurried out of the unreasonably irate professor's sight.

Professor Quirrell was ill. It made sense, and was sort of the obvious conclusion, but what sort of illness could put a wizard out of commission for a week? Wizards, as far as Harry knew, did not suffer from muggle ailments like the flu. He hoped it wasn't dragon pox or something similarly horrible.

Naturally, Harry's next stop was the hospital wing. The healer, Madam Pomfrey, if he recalled correctly, descended up on him immediately as he entered, and he had to wave his hands frantically and explain that there was nothing wrong with him; he was only visiting.

"Well, all right," said Madam Pomfrey. "And who are you visiting?"

"Is Professor Quirrell here?" he asked. Madam Pomfrey looked doubtful about his motives, so Harry added, "I've been worried about him. He was, er, helping me with something last Monday and didn't look too well and now he's missed class for a week."

Madam Pomfrey's expression softened, and she shook her head. "He's not here now. There was an emergency last week and he had to be sent to St Mungo's."

"St Mungo's?"

"The hospital," Madam Pomfrey clarified.

"Oh," said Harry a little dumbly. That sounded very serious. "I'll, er, I'll write him a note then, I suppose."

"I'm sure he'll appreciate it," said Madam Pomfrey.

Harry scribbled a get-well note for the professor, wondering if he should send some sweets or something, but then deciding that it would be awkward if he were in no state to eat them, or if he simply disliked them. It was a good choice, because he received a return note much more quickly than he had expected, via a spontaneous appearance on his plate during lunch.

"Mr Potter, thank you for your well wishes. I was discharged from St Mungo's on Saturday, though I am still in the process of recovering. I had not planned more than a theoretical discussion for today, so am still amenable to meeting at our usual time and place, provided you are free. - QQ"

When Harry approached Professor Quirrell's office that evening, he saw that the door was already ajar. Cautiously, he pushed it open and peered inside. Nobody was there, but he spotted a bit of parchment on the ground by his foot.

"Wall behind the desk. Password is 'peppercorn.'"

He picked up the parchment and put it on the desk, saying, "Peppercorn," to the wall. A door frame shimmered into view, and a brass doorknob popped out of the wall with a sucking sound. Harry reached out carefully, confirmed it was real, and opened the door to find a short, carpeted corridor. The door swung shut behind him as he entered, leaving him in darkness. Glancing around uncertainly, he whispered, " _Lumos,"_ and made his way to the end of the hall, where a sliver of flickering light peeked out from under another door. He knocked.

The door opened up on its own. Harry extinguished his wand and ventured inside what was obviously Professor Quirrell's bedroom. Directly across from the entrance was a tall mirror that made the small room look twice as large. Harry's gaze was immediately drawn to the firelit reflection of Professor Quirrell's thin, pale face peeking out from underneath a moss green blanket. Without the customary weight of the large purple turban, his bald head seemed horribly diminished.

Harry turned awkwardly so he could take a proper look at the man. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his skin looked waxy and paper-thin. At the sight of Harry, Professor Quirrell tugged himself into a more upright position. Even that little exertion, however, seemed to have tired him out, for he slumped down against his pile of pillows with a pained sigh a moment later.

"Er, hello professor. Are you, are you all right? I mean, we can meet next week instead, or whenever you're better."

"No," said a high, unfamiliar voice from somewhere around Professor Quirrell's midriff. The man's lips had not moved. "Please stay."

Professor Quirrell shuddered, glancing down momentarily, and Harry followed his gaze to see a small, scaly head pop out from beneath the blankets. "I cannot speak right now, so you will forgive me if I communicate through this snake."

"Er, okay," said Harry. "What happened to you?"

"Oh, you need not worry about me," said the snake. Harry looked to it automatically, finding it difficult to maintain eye contact with the professor when his voice was so out of place. "Just an accident. I was… overzealous with my magic and strained myself."

Professor Quirrell looked a sight worse than just "strained." He was more like a revived corpse.

"Last week we left off with a demonstration of the protection of blood, yes?" said Professor Quirrell's snake.

"That's right, sir," said Harry.

"In order to cast the curse you must forget all your usual intuition about magic. Do not focus on it. Instead, spread it across your body. Your intent must be purely to neutralise what threatens you, but not to destroy or hurt it, only to stop it. Of course, this is more easily said than done. Do you know how to manipulate magic without your wand?"

"Er, no sir," said Harry.

"Think back to when you did accidental magic. What did that feel like?"

Harry thought, obligingly. The most impressive piece of accidental magic he had done, he supposed, had been to apparate onto the school roof after being cornered by Dudley and his gang. He had been sort of desperate to get away, to get somewhere Dudley couldn't reach. That sounded right.

"I was pretty desperate," he said.

"Desperation can serve as a substitute for willpower," Professor Quirrell acknowledged, "but what you must master is exerting your full will with every action."

"How is that different from focus?" Harry asked.

"Focus is your attention. Will is your desire. You might well pay attention to something you do not truly want. It is important, when you cast magic in this way, that you know what you truly want and focus exactly on that and nothing else."

This reminded Harry of the one passage in Nic's book that had made some sense to him. "You mean like believing reality and desiring the truth, sir?"

"That is correct. For now, you should begin by thinking about what it is that you want. Presumably you wish to protect yourself from further harm by that vampire's hand. You will not be able to make progress until you have a firm grasp of your desires."

Harry nodded, sitting down cross-legged on the clover patterned rug in front of the hearth. He trailed his fingertips absently across the coarse green fibres.

The problem with this exercise, he thought, was that he did not really believe that Silviu was a threat to him any longer. Was that belief reality? What he wanted was to not have to deal with any more nonsense about being allergic to garlic and roses, and certainly never again to wake up in the middle of the night and find out he'd been made a snack of without his knowledge.

Silviu had promised Harry not to use his sympathetic magic on him again. How much was the vampire's word worth? Petri had seemed convinced that it was the real thing, and Harry could not help putting stock in Petri's opinion.

What he wanted… what he wanted was to not be stuck in situations he could not get out of. He needed to be able to escape from people who outclassed him in every respect. However, that seemed almost logically impossible.

He glanced up at Professor Quirrell and saw that the man appeared to be fast asleep. Feeling suddenly awkward, Harry got to his feet as silently as he could and approached slowly. There was no reaction from the professor. He shouldn't stay here, creepily watching his professor while he slept. It was clear the man was not actually well enough to be accepting visitors.

Harry wondered whether the snake would say or do anything now that the professor was no longer controlling it, but it only stared at him unblinkingly.

He made his way slowly to the common room, lost in thought. This curse was so markedly different from all the others that Professor Quirrell had shown him to date, and in fact from any other spell he had ever seen. Why change the style and pacing now? Harry had serious doubts that he would be able to learn it. The problem was that even if Professor Quirrell's extracurricular help was given with entirely benign intent, he was missing the point entirely.

Harry _didn't_ want to fight Silviu.

By Wednesday, Professor Quirrell had recovered enough to teach, and Defence Against the Dark Arts was back to its usual abysmal quality. If anything, Professor Quirrell's stutter had got worse, and he also seemed to have an uncontrollable tremor in his hand that apparently prevented him from demonstrating any spells safely.

"Let's stop meeting for now," Professor Quirrell said to Harry after the lesson. "I don't think it would very p-productive. Just k-keep working on the p-protection of blood, if you need something t-to do."

Harry agreed easily, though he had no intention of spending more time on that strange curse when it seemed like he had already failed its basic requirement. He had better things to do. His list of known charms and curses to practise had grown alarmingly long, and it took him the better part of each evening just to keep up his weekly revision.

"The problem is that none of these spells are useful," Hannah complained as they practised the revealing and colour-change charms on each other in their usual classroom. "I mean, they're useful sometimes, but not every day. We have to go out of our way to do this."

"Yeah," Harry agreed. "Maybe that's why we don't see people walking around using all kinds of obscure spells. It'd take forever to learn all of them, and you'd just be forgetting spells left and right." In Harry's experience so far, adult wizards usually only used the same dozen or so spells, and he was beginning to sympathise with the practice.

"Maybe it's okay to forget them," said Hannah. "I mean, if you really needed a spell, you could always look it up and it should be easy enough to cast if you used to know it, right?"

"I suppose," said Harry. "But what about defence spells? You wouldn't have time to look up something like that."

"Well, true. So we should practise those instead, you think?" Hannah asked.

" _Expelliarmus_ is pretty easy, though, and that's the only useful thing we've learned in Defence so far," Harry said.

"I still haven't got it," Hannah protested, shaking her head. "Writing Snape's essay didn't help either."

Harry stood up and backed towards the door, beckoning for her to take position on the other side of the room.

"Let's see it," he said, gripping his wand tightly. Hannah lifted her wand and half-heartedly pointed it at him.

" _Expelliarmus,_ " she said, and a moment later Harry felt a weak push against his hand, which jerked slightly to the side. He frowned. She cast too precisely and carefully.

"You need to put more force into it," he told her. "Literally."

"How?" she muttered. "Show me."

" _Expelliarmus!_ " Harry slashed his wand forward, eyes zeroing in on Hannah's wand hand. A small ball of reddish light streaked out of the end of his wand and collided with her arm, sending it snapping back, and her wand went careening into the window with a loud crack.

"Ouch!"

"Sorry, er, I think that was too much force," Harry muttered. "Are you okay?"

Hannah was rubbing at her wrist, but she nodded before moving to retrieve her wand. "Yeah, I'm fine. I think I understand. It's just weird, you know, to just attack someone like that. I'm not used to thinking of magic like that."

Harry frowned to himself. His regard for magic as only a tool rather than weapon had eroded with the very first stinging hex that Petri had cast on him, and disappeared entirely after the cruciatus. But that didn't change the fact that Hannah was probably right, and it wasn't normal to be so willing to attack other people. He knew quite a few hexes and curses already. Did that make him a dark wizard?

Despite her recognition of the problem, Hannah's best effort still only caused his arm to swing wide, and wasn't quite enough to dislodge his grip. On the other hand, it hardly produced any light, which made it difficult to dodge.

"You know, I bet you could deflect spells with this," Harry told her. "If your enemy can't see it coming, then his aim will go wide."

"Yeah, or I could just run," Hannah pointed out. "Merlin, if some dark wizard were actually casting spells at me I'd die on the spot."

Harry sighed, considering his measly arsenal of spells and how useless they would be against the likes of Petri. "Yeah, me too."

Hannah giggled, but Harry couldn't bring himself to laugh with her. He tried to distract himself from dark thoughts with work instead.

"I've still got the human-revealing spell, the cheering charm, the knitting charm to practise today," he complained. Not to mention his "other" exercises, which he had been trying to catch up on, given the imminent holiday reunion with Petri.

"Ugh don't remind me, I'm behind on my knitting," Hannah said. "You want to practise on your Christmas present?"

"Hannah!" said Harry, pulling back as if appalled, and she giggled again.

"I'm having you on. Yours is done, anyway."

"Can I see it then?" Harry asked.

"No!" Hannah cried. "No peeking."

"I thought you said no surprises?" said Harry.

"It's not a surprise. You know it's coming, you just have to wait to find out the details," Hannah maintained, smirking.

Before they knew it, the winter holiday was upon them. Professor Flitwick came around early December to collect names for who would be staying at Hogwarts. None of Harry's dorm-mates signed up. They were all eager to be getting back to their families.

While the others packed, Harry did some unpacking that he'd somehow managed to neglect all term, emptying his trunk of the equipment and uniforms that he wouldn't need while at home. Perhaps Petri's habit of living out of his trunk had rubbed off on him in a bad way. It just felt easier to have everything in arm's reach instead of having to cross the room to get to his wardrobe.

The train left from Hogsmeade Station at eleven in the morning, and apparently they would not be crossing the lake again, but taking the path around on some carriages. The first years were scheduled to go down at nine, earlier than the others.

"It's criminal to have to get up so early on a Saturday," Terry complained, rolling out of his bed and right onto the floor in a tangle of sheets.

"Aren't you excited to go home?" asked Anthony, who was already dressed and standing by the door, trunk in hand.

"Ehhhmm," Terry groaned unintelligibly.

"Have you seen my potions book?" Michael asked the room at large as he rummaged around underneath his bed. "I think I've lost it."

"Did you check all your drawers?" Anthony asked.

"Yes, yes!" Michael cried. "I checked, and my wardrobe, and my bag, and the bed. Oh no, did I leave it at the library?"

"Let's go," said Stephen. "Or we're going to be late."

"My book!" Michael wailed, clutching at his hair.

"I'm ready," said Terry, who was still wearing the rumpled robes he had slept in. He'd slipped on boots over his bare feet and stumbled over to join Anthony at the door.

Michael gave up and followed everyone else, wringing his hands and muttering to himself the entire way down to the Great Hall, where they picked up a quick breakfast before gathering at the castle doors.

The caretaker, Filch, was busy scowling nastily at some passing Slytherins when they arrived. He stood at the side of the door and handed each student a note as they went out.

"Students aren't permitted to use magic outside of Hogwarts?" Oliver read in dismay. "How are we supposed to practise then?"

"Practise?" Terry asked. "It's bad enough that we have to do homework, as is."

He had unfortunately said this rather loudly, in earshot of the girls.

"If we didn't have homework, you'd just forget all about school over the holiday, wouldn't you?" said Lisa. "They have it so half-wits like you don't fail."

"Hey, I don't need to study all the time just to pass," Terry protested. "The holiday is supposed to be a break from all that!"

Harry tuned out the bickering in favour of gawking at the carriages. They were hooked up to the strangest creatures he'd ever seen, pitch black, skeletal horses with leathery wings pressed close to their sides. If he didn't know better, he would've guessed that they were some kind of inferius version of a pegasus. But that would certainly be illegal.

"What are those?" he asked.

"What are what?" asked Stephen, following his gaze but apparently finding nothing out of the ordinary.

"What's pulling the carriages?" Harry clarified.

"Er, magic?" said Stephen.

"What?" said Harry, blinking.

"Aren't you the one who's good at charms? There's got to be some charm to make them go on their own, right?" Stephen asked.

"I meant those horse things," Harry said, pointing. "What are they called?"

Stephen looked as totally bewildered as Harry felt. "What are you talking about?"

"What are you guys talking about?" asked Michael, who looked to have finally come to terms with his lack of potions book.

"I don't know!" said Stephen.

"I'm talking about the things pulling the carriages," said Harry, who didn't understand how he could possibly make himself clearer. Could they not _see_ the weird horses?

"What things?" asked Michael. "There's nothing there."

"Exactly!" Stephen cried.

Harry stared at them incredulously, wondering if they were playing some kind of practical joke on him. Or perhaps they really couldn't see. Maybe there was some spell on the horses that for some reason didn't work on Harry.

"Let's just get on," Harry muttered. As they approached, he cautiously moved near the horses and extended a hand. They peered at him with inky eyes, but did not make any threatening sounds or movements, so he patted one gently on the flank. It was soft and furry, and definitely real.

He turned to Stephen and Michael. "Put your hand here," he said.

They shot him bizarre looks, but when Harry reached out to take Stephen's wrist he let himself be guided. Harry put the boy's hand on the horse.

"There's something there!" Stephen said, jerking back his hand momentarily before reaching out again.

Feeling vindicated, Harry boarded the carriage. Obviously, since they couldn't even see it, Stephen and Michael wouldn't be any help in identifying it. He wished he had brought _Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,_ but it was one of the books he had left in the dormitory since it did not relate to any of his homework.

Fortunately, Michael had brought all his books (with the exception of the potions text). The _Fantastic Beasts_ book lacked pictures, however, so Harry was forced to spend the next hour so, while they idled in the train station, essentially reading through entry by entry. As it transpired, there were quite a few creatures whose physical description he was unfamiliar with, so it was slow going.

"They're thestrals!" he exclaimed when he finally found the correct entry. Stephen and Michael glanced obligingly at the book, but did not seem much interested, and Harry returned it to Michael, somewhat glad that they hadn't asked the awkward question of whom Harry had seen die.

Finally, the train arrived in concert with the older students, and everybody scrambled to board it in a disorderly fashion. Harry tried to find his friends, but only managed to run into Neville. They shared the compartment with some older Hufflepuffs, who ignored them and chattered to each other the whole time. Neville broke out his wizard's chess set and tried to teach Harry to play, but Harry was pretty rubbish at it and managed to lose three times by noon. Neville seemed pretty chuffed at that.

"I always play Ron and he's really, really good," he told Harry. "I've never won against him."

"Are you in the chess club?" Harry asked. Neville shook his head.

"I'm really no good," he said.

"What am I then?" Harry laughed. Neville smiled uncertainly.

When the sweets trolley came by, Harry decided against getting anything, congratulating himself for having the foresight to nick some toast from breakfast. He nibbled at it while Neville chewed on some licorice wands. After this lunch, Neville slumped in his seat and dozed off, and Harry decided to follow his example.

They woke to the blare of a horn signalling their arrival at Platform Nine and Three-Quarters, and stumbled quickly to their feet to get off the train.

The moment Harry disembarked he found himself nearly colliding with the black-clad form of Silviu, who looked fresh and youthful, like he'd just gorged himself on blood.

"What are you doing here?" Harry demanded, looking around wildly for some sign of Petri and finding nothing. He swore he had owled the man with the correct date, though admittedly he'd only sent it off a couple days ago.

"Harry! I'm here to take you home, of course," said Silviu quite reasonably.

Neville, who had exited the train just behind Harry, hovered uncertainly nearby.

"Is this your, er, uncle?" he asked.

"No!" said Harry too quickly. "He's, er, a family friend."

"Quite right," said Silviu with a thankfully close-lipped smile. "And you are?"

"N-neville Longbottom."

"Silviu Vlaicu. Pleased to meet you."

Then there was an awkward moment where Silviu extended his long-fingered, clawed hand and Neville paused for a long time before he worked up the courage to shake it.

"Oh, there's my gran," said Neville, pulling away and pointing into the crowd. Harry followed his gaze and his eyes landed on a tall, severely stiff woman wearing a wide-brimmed witch's hat with what appeared to be a taxidermy vulture on top.

Suddenly, Harry was a little glad that all he had was a vampire.

"Bye Neville," he said, waving at his friend. "Have a nice holiday."

"Bye Harry. You too! Happy Christmas."

"How are we getting home?" Harry asked, because Silviu was not leading them towards the floo queue.

"We're walking," said Silviu, and Harry was immediately suspicious.

"No, really," he pressed.

"Really," said Silviu. "Hold on tightly."

And with that, Silviu crouched down and scooped him up bodily, so that Harry barely managed to keep a grip on his trunk, and then they seemed to have sunk into a horrible river of hot, pitch dark tar. Harry made the mistake of attempting to breathe and found that it was like inhaling wet cotton. There was no room even to choke.

They emerged in the back room of the Coffin House and Harry thought he might vomit, except when he took a deep breath everything seemed to be back in order, like he hadn't been drowning in an unidentifiable substance just a moment prior.

"Walking," Harry repeated, once he'd managed to gather his scattered wits. Silviu set him down gently on the floor.

"That is what we called it in Transylvania," said Silviu blithely.

"Can't you apparate like a normal person?" Harry asked.

"No," said Silviu. "But I seem to recall that wizard apparition was also very unpleasant."

"I suppose," Harry had to concede. He still wasn't sure which was worse, getting squished by a narrow tube or suffocated by tar. "Where's my uncle? You're not kidnapping me again, are you?"

"Of course not. Your…" Silviu paused, "uncle, is away on a business trip in Norway."

"Again?" Harry asked. What was it with Christmas and solo trips to Norway? "When is he back?"

Silviu shrugged. "Is he actually your uncle?"

Harry felt that Silviu had been involved in enough shady business by now that it would be pointless to attempt to lie. He wrinkled his nose.

"No. My master, whatever. I just got used to calling him my uncle at school. Nobody else is already an apprentice. You didn't answer my question. When's he going to be back?"

"I don't know," said Silviu. "He didn't say. Irresponsible of him."

Harry thought it was plenty irresponsible of Petri to have left him with Silviu at all.

"It's fine. I've got my key," Harry said, and he knew where Petri kept the stock of nutritive potions. The thought was a little depressing. Nutritive potions, after all the decadent meals he'd had at Hogwarts. He'd probably be having nutritive potions for Christmas too, while they would be enjoying a feast of epic proportions up at the castle. Perhaps he should have signed up to stay there.

"Nonsense," said Silviu. "You can stay with me until he returns."

"I'll get chopped up and eaten by hags," Harry said. "You're the one who always complains it's not safe."

"It's safe," said Silviu. "You're in my company now." And he patted Harry fondly on the head. Harry made a face.

"Don't take this the wrong way," he began, "but I've been wondering since forever. What do you eat?"

"I eat all sorts of things," said Silviu a little facetiously. "But you mean, of course, where do I get my blood, yes?"

"Yes, that," said Harry. "Other than from unsuspecting children."

"I am very sorry for that, Harry. Really. I was so worried then… I wasn't in my right mind, though I know that's no excuse. But what's done is done. Anyway, I generally get blood from the human members and friends of the company, as is customary."

"You're not biting me again," said Harry, stepping back slightly.

"I won't," said Silviu. "Not unless you ask me to. I'm not like—well, I'm not like that."

Harry couldn't imagine why anybody would ask for a vampire to bite them. It seemed stupid.

"It's not bad," Silviu said, and he had an almost wistful look on his face. "Some people even enjoy it."

"Are you reading my mind?" Harry demanded.

"Sorry," said Silviu unabashedly. "I can't really help it when you're broadcasting your thoughts like that. You could try to learn some occlumency, but I hear it's extremely hard for wizards."

"Occlumency, so that's a defence against mind-reading—against legilimency?" Harry asked, and Silviu nodded. His mind flashed to Professor Quirrell and their lessons and he winced and tried not to think about it.

Trying not to think about something, of course, always backfired.

"Charming professor you have," Silviu said. "It's good that you've been learning to defend yourself, even if it's against me. Though I really think you should be learning to counter that master of yours. Nasty piece of work. I understand you're a good student, but that doesn't mean he'll bother to qualify you. There's nothing stopping him from keeping you in his service forever."

"I don't have to worry about that for years," Harry pointed out.

"Procrastination is the enemy of, well, everything," said Silviu. "I could teach you a few tricks."

"Maybe later," said Harry. It wasn't procrastination; it was time management. "I'd like to get a shower and something to eat. Where do you live, anyway?"

"Under my shop," said Silviu. "I'll show you."

He walked over to the back corner of the room. There was a heavy iron trap door in the ground, with a ring handle, which Silviu lifted open without much apparent effort. He gestured for Harry to precede him, which he did rather cautiously, half expecting the vampire to shut it behind him and lock him in a hole or something. A steep metal staircase led down to unseen depths.

"Relax," said Silviu, joining him and putting a hand on his shoulder. It was cold and not particularly reassuring. He lowered the door down carefully and then they were left in near total darkness, only a thin square perimeter of light making it through from above. Normally, Harry would choose this moment to cast a wand-lighting charm, but they had been issued with a threatening warning about not doing any magic outside of Hogwarts, or they could be expelled. Harry was sure that Petri would have some way to get around that pesky law, but Petri wasn't here yet.

"You should be fine to cast magic here," said Silviu. "There's plenty of magic going on in Knockturn all the time. They won't know it's you."

"Are you sure?" he demanded.

"I'm sure, but I'm also sure you could see in the dark if you tried. Being in my company isn't without its benefits," Silviu said cryptically.

Not willing to get expelled over something stupid, Harry blinked rapidly and tried to see more of his surroundings. His eyes really were getting more used to the very dim illumination, and he thought he could make out the stairs beneath his feet and the top of a wardrobe at eye-level to his left, but it still wasn't much.

Then everything suddenly brightened rapidly until it was almost grey, and Harry remembered that his spectacles had a night vision setting. With more certainty in his step, he finished descending the stairs into Silviu's home.

Unlike the wooden structure above, the walls here were made of solid brick. The air was cold and a little damp, but not musty, and the whole place smelled vaguely of soot. As one might expect in an ordinary parlour, there were armchairs and a couch arranged around a low wooden table, and a small hearth off to the right that was probably for making floo calls.

A folding screen that did not quite make it to the ceiling blocked off the left side of the room. Here, Harry remembered that he could see through things with the aid of his glasses, and he spent a moment fiddling with the tiny screw on the side that controlled the settings.

His vision zoomed alarmingly, but he managed to find the wardrobe he had noticed earlier, as well as a deep hole in the stone floor that looked disturbingly like an unearthed grave, complete with empty coffin. It was probably where Silviu slept, if he ever slept, considering how often he was up and about during the day.

"How about I sleep at home, and spend the day, er, night, I don't know, whenever I'm awake, here?" he suggested. Why had he agreed to stay with Silviu again? He was perfectly capable of living by himself in his and Petri's coffin house, and wasn't about to stoop to actually sleeping in a regular, non-expanded coffin when he had a serviceable bed.

"That was the plan," said Silviu. "But surely you aren't planning to go to sleep already? It's only six."

He hadn't really thought about what he was going to do when he got home. Petri usually decided the day's activities for both of them, which he supposed was a little depressing. At Hogwarts, he had spent most of his free time either playing games with his mates or practising spells, but he had resolved not to do more than his homework over the holiday. It was called a holiday for a reason!

"If you don't have any plans," Silviu said, "may I suggest we set up your master's Christmas present?"

"What?" said Harry, wondering if he had misheard.

"Come, I'll show you," said Silviu. "You can leave your things here."

Harry set down his trunk and followed the vampire, who was thankfully electing to walk like a human being to wherever their destination was.

Leticia the hag was staffing the front of the shop, where all the coffins for dead people were. A stately funeral march was playing from the radio behind the counter. There were no customers around, and her beady eyes zeroed in on them as soon as they emerged fro the back.

"Is this our newest family member?" she asked, giggling for no apparent reason.

"Business partner," Silviu corrected lightly.

"I knew you'd get him," said Leticia. "You always get what you want, you sly old dog. What's your name again, young man?"

"Harry," said Harry cautiously. Somehow, the sound of his name sent Leticia into peals of laughter.

"Harry!" she repeated in a sing-song way. "How lovely to meet you, Harry. Or meet you again. Or, I'unno. I'm Leticia." She tapped the grubby metal name tag on her chest. "Don't be a stranger!"

"She's always like that," said Silviu as they exited his shop, before Harry could ask.

"Right. Lovely. So where are we going?" he asked instead.

"Right here," said Silviu, and indeed, they had stopped just next door, at another storefront. A very crooked wooden sign hanging from its chain read, "Moribund's."

"Bugger. He's gone and locked the door again," Silviu said, trying the handle. Harry would have assumed the shop was closed, but there was clearly a light on inside. He jumped as Silviu banged on the door with a tremendous amount of force, so that the entire building seemed to shake.

There was no response for a long while.

Silviu drew his wand and murmured, " _Nox."_ The light inside flickered, before returning to full force. He then gave another rattling knock.

This time, they heard footsteps approaching, and the clinking of a chain as the deadbolt was drawn back. The door opened up and revealed a surprisingly normal-looking, bespectacled man in smart brown work robes. He waved at them, and glanced curiously to Harry.

"This is Mr Moribund," Silviu told Harry. "He's our company's solicitor."

"Nice to meet you, sir," said Harry. "I'm Harry."

Mr Moribund held up an index finger to bid them wait, then reached into an inner pocket and produced a small slate and a piece of chalk. He scribbled on it rapidly before flipping it around to show them.

"Nice to meet you, Harry. I'm Sam Moribund, Death Consultant," it read.

Harry blinked sceptically at the last part, and Mr Moribund laughed. It was an uncanny, almost chilling laugh, and loud enough to echo down the empty alley. He exchanged an amused glance with Silviu before beckoning for them both to enter.

Inside was a dingy, cramped office in utter disarray. Half-open filing cabinets took up the majority of the space that wasn't occupied by the ancient, scuffed wooden desk, and the rest was filled by a pair of heavy, floral-patterned wing-back chairs that had seen better days. Stuffing was leaking out of the seams, and there was a dark stain on one of the seats. Everything was illuminated in a harsh orange light that originated from a grimy, floating glass orb that jittered as if the enchantment were about to give out any minute.

Mr Moribund was rifling through the drawers of the desk. He produced a piece of parchment and a somewhat bent eagle-feather quill and pushed aside a stack of books to make writing space. To his credit, his calligraphy was impeccable, and Harry would've sworn the document he was working on had been done by an expensive dicta-quill, had he not seen the man writing it by hand with his own eyes.

"Your master has been wanting to open up his own shop," Silviu said to Harry. "I told him in no uncertain terms that only my company is going to be getting any paperwork through to let that happen, and he pointed out that you are in my company. He assured me you wouldn't be opposed, but I wanted to hear it from you in person, so here we are. You aren't opposed, are you?"

"No," said Harry. "It'd be nice if he had his shop again." It would give Petri something legal to do at any rate, instead of whatever shady business he was up to these days.

"Good. Mr Moribund will draw up and file the contract, we'll get the community vote, and it'll be taken care of in a matter of days," said Silviu, clapping his hands.

After just a few minutes Mr Moribund turned and gave them a thumbs up. He reached into a small stone pot at the corner of his desk and resurfaced with a handful of coarse sand, which he strewed across his finished parchment.

Harry had been a little worried that he would be asked to sign something, but it turned out that there was really no reason for his presence. The contract was instead for Silviu, who barely glanced at it before signing with Mr Moribund's quill.

"I'm agreeing to be liable for the new spatial expansion that will be needed for the shop, since this is my land," Silviu explained. "It needs to be filed with regulators at the Ministry, and then the Knockturn Alley community will vote on whether they agree to have the new building. Of course my company holds the majority of Knockturn space so that will be no problem."

"Who _isn't_ in your company?" Harry asked.

"There aren't many. Only Charles and Elaine at the White Wyvern, the section across the street with Borgin and McHavelock and those junk shops, and Mr Mulpepper at the apothecary."

It was just like Silviu said—the space expansion was approved in a matter of days, and contractors with a pair of construction trolls arrived early morning on Monday to lay the foundation and begin exterior construction. With the aid of magic the new building practically sprouted out of the ground over the course of the day, and was finished up by evening. It had been erected at 13-C Knockturn Alley, aggressively adjacent to Borgin and Burkes, which Harry was sure had been intentional.

Afterwards they returned to Moribund's, where Mr Moribund silently dropped a large stack of paperwork into Harry's arms.

"The shop will officially be under your name," Silviu explained.

"I have no idea how to fill this out," Harry said, staring down at the arcane jargon that covered the Ministry forms. He had a wand registration signature? What in the world was a disillusionment liability clause waiver?

Most importantly, what were they going to name the shop?

Searching for things he thought he knew the answers to, he put down his name, address, and birthday, and scribbled, "enchanted glassware, crystal, and china," in the box for product description.

"Is it really legal for me to have a shop?" Harry asked, just to make sure.

"Perfectly legal," said Silviu, "as I own the property and have assumed liability. Don't worry too much about the details."

Harry supposed that meant it would be on Silviu's head if something went wrong, while he got to do all the fun, aesthetic parts.

Back in Germany, Petri's shop had been named "Wunderkunst." It did not translate particularly well into English, in Harry's opinion.

"The Enchanter's Art?" Silviu suggested, but Harry shook his head.

"It doesn't fit in with the rest of the Alley," he protested. Petri's false English name, Peters (and his real name as well, for that matter), sounded entirely too plebeian and mudblood to acceptably feature in the shop name, so emulating Mr Mulpepper's Apothecary or Shyverwretch's Venoms and Poisons was out. On the other hand, a simple, informative name like Glass Enchantments or something seemed too boring to be memorable.

"I'll think of something," Harry said, and looked up expectantly at Silviu for him to show him how to complete the rest of the paperwork, which took nearly all day.


	29. Craftsman

Petri returned the next day, the morning of Christmas Eve, looking pleased in a way that could only mean an inflow of galleons had been involved.

"Harry. Good to see you still alive," he said as he descended the coffin stairs and dropped his trunk carelessly in the corner.

Harry immediately scowled, rolling off the bed and onto his feet to better show his displeasure. "You thought Silviu might eat me?"

Petri's eyes crinkled in amusement. "I only jest," he said. "But now, seriously; how was he? No attempts to convince you to give blood? Possessive behavior?"

"No," said Harry. "Not really. It was fine. I think my sleep schedule is ruined, though. We spent all last night—that's right. Er, happy Christmas. We got you a shop."

Petri blinked at him. "Repeat that," he said.

"We got you a shop," Harry repeated obligingly. "I've got all the official paperwork and everything over there." He pointed to their all-purpose table. "It's at thirteen-C right by that cursed rubbish shop, and we named it Crystal Wonders. Er, hope that's okay." They had spent the better part of the previous evening putting up a signboard with the name over the entrance.

"It's Christmas Eve," said Petri, face twisting with unidentifiable emotion. "We have to open it _immediately._ "

He picked up his discarded trunk and the stack of parchments on the table and turned right back around. Harry supposed that meant that Petri was pleased.

"Wait, I'm not dressed," Harry protested. Petri waved his wand, and Harry's robes flew up from where they had fallen to the floor and hit him in the face. He peeled them away, frowning at how rumpled they were, and then traded them for his nightgown.

Petri straightened him out with an ironing charm that thankfully only applied to his clothing and nothing else, before striding up the stairs so quickly that Harry had to run after him.

"Thirteen-C, you said?" Petri asked, leafing through the papers.

"Yeah," Harry confirmed.

"Vlaicu had it built over the weekend?"

"It was wicked," said Harry. "They did it all just yesterday. There were these trolls, and they were huge and lifting up whole tree trunks like nothing. Oh, that reminds me, there was a troll at school once, and remember I wrote you about the fidelius charm, that was that night. Professor Qu—one of my professors recognised me and—"

"Slow down," said Petri. "I do not follow. Are you saying you believe a troll influenced the fidelius charm? They resist magic but I've never heard of them disrupting it."

"No, that's not it," said Harry more slowly, realising that he had probably sounded a bit like an excited Hermione Granger right then, which wasn't great. "The troll's not related. Well, it sort of is, because I was with Professor Quirrell because of it, but that's all."

"And this Quirrell recognised you as Harry Potter? You are sure?" Petri asked.

"Yeah, he looked right at me and said my full name without even trying," said Harry.

"Hmm," Petri muttered. "Perhaps that's possible, that somebody could subconsciously say your name even while not consciously associating..."

"I don't know, he seemed pretty conscious," said Harry doubtfully. It sounded like a stretch, and though he was no expert, Petri hadn't sounded very sure.

Indeed, the man shook his head. "It is rather unlikely. But equally or perhaps more unlikely is that somebody has broken the fidelius charm. There are only two weaknesses to the fidelius charm. One is somebody overhearing the secret during the casting, the second is their hearing or overhearing the secret being told by the secret-keeper. Both seem impossible to me. We cast that spell in a tent in the forest. Even if Lucius Malfoy were scrying for us, which I doubt he had the expertise to do, then at most _he_ would know your secret, and not some unknown professor of yours. You did not know him before Hogwarts, yes?"

"Who, Professor Quirrell? No," said Harry. He was sure he would've remembered seeing that turban.

"I don't believe I've heard of him either. Could he be some enemy of mine? Is he English? How old does he look?" Petri asked.

"Dunno, maybe thirty?" Harry guessed. He wasn't great at estimating the ages of adults. "Definitely English."

"That's not it, then. But nobody could have heard or overheard Rosenkol telling the secret because he has never told it to anybody," Petri said. But the only possibility seemed to be that Rosenkol _had_ told somebody. Nothing else made sense.

Petri seemed to have come to the same conclusion, because when they finally reached the new shop, the first thing he did was summon the house elf.

"Master and wizardling, how may Rosenkol be serving?" said Rosenkol.

"Rosenkol, have you ever told Harry's secret to anybody?" Petri asked. Rosenkol immediately shook his head, his bat-like ears flopping about wildly.

"Rosenkol is never telling, Master," he said firmly, "Never unless Master commands."

Petri sighed and rubbed at his temples. "I don't know," he finally said. "But there's something we're missing. Well, we have time before you return to school. For now, the shop."

He dropped his trunk and kicked it over, before fiddling at the lock with his key. The trunk opened up to the compartment full of glassware, and Petri began to conjure glass shelves and stick them to the walls.

"This will do until we get properly furnished," he muttered.

The glass against the wooden wall reminded Harry a little of the charms club rotunda at Hogwarts. "Can we keep the shelves permanently?" he asked. "I think they look good. It fits with the theme."

"Perhaps. My conjurations aren't very high quality, but I might be able to build real glass shelves later," said Petri, who was already busying himself with placing displays by the window. "Rosenkol, stock the shelves with everything I have here," he ordered. The elf snapped his fingers and emptied the trunk, sending items zooming about through the room. "Harry, make yourself useful and advertise the shop."

"Advertise?" Harry asked. "How?"

"Go out and hand out fliers. Something like this," said Petri, shutting his trunk and turning the key twice more. He opened it into the trap door, and waved his wand. A few moments later, a stack of parchment and a quill flew into his outstretched hand. He pressed his wand against the top sheet, face screwing up in concentration, and then handed it over to Harry.

Opening and Christmas Sale!

Crystal Wonders

Enchanted items for all ages: Toys, Games, Tea Sets, Precision Magical Equipment

Custom Orders Available

13-C Knockturn Alley, just off Horizont

"Use this copy quill and add some colour-changing charms," said Petri, giving him quill and the rest of the parchments.

"They told us we're not allowed to do magic outside of school," said Harry.

Petri scoffed. "That law only applies to mudbloods," he said with full certainty. "We're in Knockturn Alley. I assure you it's allowed."

Now Harry felt a little silly not to have believed Silviu, and for spending the first few days of his holiday as lame as a muggle. He put the first flier at the bottom of the stack of parchment and set the tip of the copy quill on top. The quill stood on its own and quickly began to trace the master copy. When it finished a sheet, it would flip over to sweep it to the side before starting on the next.

"What spell did you use to write all that at once?" Harry asked. Was this the spell Draco Malfoy had mentioned, for "wizard writing?" Harry had tried to look up something like it in the _Complete Compendium_ , but had met with no success.

"Colour-changing charm," said Petri. "Faster than handwriting, though somewhat trickier."

"Oh."

Once the copy quill had made several copies, Harry took one and started to prod it with his wand, filling in the block letters of the shop name with bright blue. He couldn't believe it hadn't occurred to him that if he could change the colour of part of something, then he could indeed just make words appear like a contrasting pattern.

By the time Harry felt satisfied with the look of the first flier, the copy quill had just about made it through the entire parchment stack. He waited for it to finish up and then, glancing at the original for the right mental image, cast the colour-changing charm on the whole stack. To his delight, it worked perfectly. He had been afraid that he would need to manually colour each one.

"Go hand those out in Horizont," Petri recommended. It looked like he and Rosenkol had already finished laying everything out in the meantime. "It's closest."

The intersection with Horizont Alley was indeed just beyond the locksmith at number fourteen. Though it was right around the corner, the atmosphere there differed profoundly from the dingy, hemmed-in feel of Knockturn. Horizont Alley was more of a wide boulevard, with low buildings and a generous strip in the centre dedicated to delicate fruit trees and flowering shrubs. They must have been some magical variety, because they were in full bloom, utterly undaunted by the winter frost. Further down the street was the sparkling Fountain of Fair Fortune, which Harry understood had been named after a fountain in a fairy tale of the same name.

View of the fountain was presently blocked by an enormous queue of people who had wound completely around it and then dissolved into a confused horde of people milling about on the other side of the alley. Harry craned his neck to try to find the source, but he was too short to see anything so he had to venture closer to the crowd.

People were definitely waiting for something. He saw more than one wizard staring blankly off into space, tapping his foot on the cobblestones in agitation. There were harried mothers with little children trying to stop them from wandering off, as well as a gaggle of unsupervised children who looked to be successful escapees.

"Excuse me," Harry said to a kind-looking witch with a daughter about his age at her elbow. He didn't recognise the girl from Hogwarts, so she was probably younger.

"Yes?" said the woman, smiling gently at him.

"Do you know what's going on here?" he asked.

"Oh, we're all in a queue for Pilliwinkle's," she said, sighing. "Looks like it'll be another hour yet before we even get in the door."

"The toy shop?" Harry asked. "Christmas shopping?"

"That's right, dear." The woman looked around and then asked, "Are you here with your parents?"

Harry shook his head. "I live around here," he said. "What sorts of toys are you looking for? My uncle's just opened a shop, and he might have something you'd like."

He held out a flier, smiling up at the woman hopefully. She took it from him, smiling back, but then her face fell. Harry guessed that it was the Knockturn Alley part that was responsible.

"It's not far," he said, pretending that he hadn't noticed. "I just came from there. It's perfectly safe."

The woman did not appear to believe him at all, but instead looked even more concerned. Harry decided to capitalise on it.

"I'm supposed to advertise it," he said. "It's new, so nobody knows it. I thought people here might be interested, but maybe I'll just go back to Knockturn. What do you think, ma'am?"

"We'll come take a look, dear," said the witch. "We're not getting anywhere standing here, and I wouldn't want you to have to go back empty handed."

Success, Harry thought.

The girl grinned at him from behind her mother's back.

"Are you really from Knockturn Alley?" she asked him in a whisper. Harry nodded, and her eyes widened. "Wicked! My brothers will be so jealous I got to go there."

"You've got brothers? Older or younger?" Harry asked.

"Six brothers," said the girl, wrinkling her nose. "All older. My name's Ginny by the way."

"Harry," said Harry, eyes bugging out a little at Ginny's sibling count.

"Like Harry Potter," said Ginny, and for a moment Harry was afraid the fidelius charm had completely broken and everybody now knew him, but the faraway look in her eyes reassured him that she was just making the comparison without any recognition.

"Yeah, like him," he said a little belatedly.

"He's in Ron—my youngest older brother's year," she told him. That could be none other than the Gryffindor Ron Weasley, Harry thought, "I'm going to Hogwarts next year. Do you think I'll meet him?"

"I'm sure you will," said Harry, a little amused.

"Are you going to Hogwarts already?" she asked.

"I am," said Harry.

Ginny looked like she had loads more to say, but then they turned onto Knockturn Alley and she was immediately distracted by the tall, ramshackle architecture and eerie ambiance. Knockturn was nearly totally deserted, as was usual during the morning, and the silence was almost oppressive when juxtaposed with the bustle of Horizont.

Fortunately, the lack of people also meant lack of hags peddling human body parts. Harry rather thought that would have been a turn off for the kindly Mrs Weasley.

"Here we are," Harry said cheerfully, pointing up at the sign he and Silviu had stayed up until midnight (well, Harry had considered it staying up, anyway) to painstakingly paint by hand. The signboard had a black background, with glimmering white and blue lettering that evoked shards of glass.

"Mum, look!" said Ginny, pointing to the window display, which Harry had to admit was pretty eye-catching. A pair of beautifully dressed porcelain dolls were dancing a slow waltz in the courtyard of a magnificent three-dimensional castle composed of thousands of shards of colourful stained glass. Petri always used the castle in his displays. While it was very artistic, Harry couldn't imagine what use anybody would have for it, which explained why no one had ever purchased it.

The lady doll saw them watching, waved, and then covered her mouth with a hand, as if giggling.

Harry pushed open the shop door and held it for his companions.

"Welcome!" said Petri from behind the counter, somehow managing to look like a jovial old man rather than a menacing dark wizard. "What can I help you with?"

At this point, Mrs Weasley seemed finally to realise that she had arrived at a real, honest-to-goodness shop where things might be purchased, and not some shady hole, or whatever she had been concerned about on Harry's behalf.

"Well, my daughter is looking for a present for her friend," she said, and pushed the suddenly shy Ginny forward somewhat. "Ginny dear, tell him what you're looking for."

"I've got five sickles," she said very matter-of-factly. "I want something wicked."

Petri shot Harry a wry look, as if to say, "All that work for five sickles?" Harry scowled at him.

"All our toys are on this side," said Petri, gesturing to his right, and Ginny went off to search, her mother following close behind.

Predictably, Ginny reached for the animated dragon figurines, but those were several galleons out of her price range.

"I hardly think Luna would care for that sort of thing," said Mrs Weasley.

"I s'pose not," said Ginny. She browsed around for something cheaper. "What's this?" she asked, picking up what appeared to be a small magnifying glass.

"That's an odd-eye glass," said Petri. "Try looking through it."

Ginny held it up to her face and did a survey of the room. She promptly giggled. "Mum, you're tiny! And Harry's huge." She looked outside and laughed again. "How much is this?"

"Seven sickles," said Petri, and Harry was about to feel bad when he added, "but for you let's make it five, how about it?"

"Yes!" Ginny whooped. "Mum, Luna'd love this, wouldn't she?"

"Definitely," said Mrs Weasley. She smiled indulgently as Ginny ran up to the counter and paid for her purchase on her own.

"Bye Harry!" Ginny called as they left.

"That was nice," Harry said, turning a suspicious eye on Petri. "It wasn't even worth five sickles, was it?"

"Of course not," said Petri. Harry went over to the shelf and picked up another odd-eye glass. He peered through it and found that the world did, indeed, look very odd. The sizes of objects were all messed up. He choked back a laugh as he trained the thing on Petri and saw his head bulging like an insect's.

Come to think of it, Vince might like this thing. He was always game for a quick chuckle.

"How do you make these?" Harry asked.

Petri got a funny glint in his eye at this question. "Oh, it's very simple," he said, "I will show you tonight. For now, watch the shop. _I'm_ going to go advertise."

He held out his hand and Harry gave him the stack of fliers.

It was Christmas Eve, Harry realised properly as he went to stand behind the counter, and he hadn't got presents for all his friends yet. Hannah, who hated surprises, was taken care of—he'd told her he would get her heaps of chocolate, which she seemed more than amenable to. While he had owl ordered that, he had gone ahead and got an assortment of other sweets as well, which he figured he could send his housemates.

Vince and Neville would probably appreciate sweets well enough, but he could perhaps throw in an odd-eye glass if he managed to learn to make them by the end of the day. Or maybe something else for Neville, but he couldn't think of what. What else could he enchant that wasn't boring?

Then a customer arrived, flier in hand, jolting Harry out of his reverie. Surprisingly, he recognised this customer; it was Professor Snape.

"Good morning sir, how can I help you?" Harry said. To his pleasant surprise, Professor Snape now seemed capable of looking right at him without getting immediately frustrated.

"Good morning. You—are you a student at Hogwarts?" Professor Snape asked after a moment.

"Er, yes sir," said Harry, wondering if there was going to be some interrogation about his age.

"Ravenclaw?" asked the professor.

"Yes," Harry confirmed. Unluckily, the strange consternation that always seemed to plague Professor Snape around him was returning. No doubt the man was butting right up against the fidelius charm, and it didn't look as if he were about to win anytime soon.

Why was it different for Professor Quirrell, then?

"Why are you working at a shop, here, instead of off gallivanting with your friends?" Professor Snape asked at length, sneering.

"This is my uncle's shop," said Harry. "I'm watching it while he's out."

"Ah yes, your uncle," said Professor Snape, glancing down at his flier. He seemed finally ready to return to business. "I saw that you sell magical instruments. Do you carry normalisers?"

Harry thanked his lucky stars that the man had asked after the one instrument that he had some idea about, namely due to the code-phrase that Petri had always used with his "Other" clients.

"We do, here," said Harry, bending down to retrieve one from the storage space behind the counter. Petri always kept the delicate, expensive items down there, and he was glad that that practice hadn't changed.

The normaliser was inside a padded wooden chest, and was a palm-sized, hexagonal ring of glass tubing that had a small opening at each vertex. It also came with a porcelain nub that served as a stand. He set the stand down and positioned the ring above it, where it began to hover and spin slowly in place.

Profesor Snape drew his wand slowly from somewhere in his sleeve. "Do you mind if I do a water test?" he asked.

"Go ahead, sir," said Harry. Professor Snape cast the water-making charm and the stream arced neatly out of his wand and right into the centre of the ring, where it swirled around in a whirlpool before being sucked inside the tubing. The normaliser spun more quickly now, glowing faintly white, before it slowed back down, evidently empty. Professor Snape reached out and picked up the ring with his thumb and forefinger, holding it up to eye level presumably to inspect it for water droplets. At length, he nodded.

"Seems to be in order," he said. "How much?"

This part was a problem. Nobody had ever tried to buy one of these anytime Harry had watched the shop, and Petri had not put the cheat sheet behind the counter yet. The most expensive thing he remembered seeing on there had been twenty-five galleons. He knew that the normaliser was up there.

"Twenty galleons," he said, hoping his guess had been close. Would Professor Snape try to haggle?

The professor handed over the galleons wordlessly, and Harry figured he had probably miscalculated and quoted too-low a price. He didn't look forward to explaining to Petri that he might have lost potential money. Then again, it was the man's own fault that he had left him without the price sheet. At least the cash box was there. He deposited the galleons inside and put the normaliser back in its wooden chest, pushing it across the counter.

"Was there anything else I could help you with, sir?" Harry asked when Professor Snape had taken the box but remained standing there. Amusingly enough, he appeared to still be attempting to divine Harry's identity.

Finally he said, "No thank you. I'll be on my way," and turned on his heel sharply to leave.

"Have a nice day!" Harry called after him. He amused himself by trying to stow his wand in his sleeve like Professor Snape, but it made an awkward bump in his arm. He wondered if he could get Petri to cast the undetectable extension charm on his sleeves so that he could use them as storage.

After a pause, a steady stream of customers began arriving, perhaps redirected from the ghastly queue at Pilliwinkle's Playthings. Petri's shop was definitely not as cheerful or vibrant, but it did sell a surprising variety of toys and games. These items had been the most popular sellers in Germany as well, so Harry was fortunately well-acquainted with their pricing. They actually had run out of premium Gobstones sets by the time Petri returned, which in Harry's opinion was good riddance.

"Help me restock," Petri said to Harry, after he'd finished gleefully counting the day's sales. "It's about time you learned the timing charm."

"Can I make an odd-eye glass for my friend?"

"We can make a dozen of those," Petri told him. "But first, try the timing charm, _exspectato_. The wand movement is like this." He slashed his wand downward very quickly and precisely, and then brought it back up in a similar fashion. Then he conjured a glass orb and set it on the table. "You can blend a flick into the movement. For example, _wingardium leviosa exspectato, ad infinitum, deleo._ "

Swish, a down and up slash, then a spiral that tightened into a twirl. The glass orb began to oscillate, floating up before dropping down and floating up again.

"You must keep in mind exactly how much time you want the spell to wait. Tell me what you think it's doing," said Petri.

"It's levitating, then waiting, then levitating again over and over?" Harry guessed.

"It is waiting, and then levitating," Petri corrected. "And so on. You apply the spells in reverse order. Try it with just the single levitation charm and timing charm." He cancelled the charm on the orb.

"Er," Harry muttered, taking out his wand. " _Wingardium leviosa exspectato deleo_ ," he incanted.

Nothing happened for a moment, and then the orb shot up like he had just levitated it. Harry blinked in disbelief at his successful first try.

"Your wandwork has improved significantly," Petri told him with an approving nod.

"How do I make it go up and down? Is that the _ad infinitum_ part?" Harry asked.

"Correct," said Petri. "Try it if you'd like."

While Harry was busy trying to get the orb to bounce up and down properly instead of rising, dropping to the ground, and rolling away before jerking up again, Petri retrieved his trunk and opened it up to a fourth compartment that Harry hadn't seen before. He stopped to look. It was full of large jars of white powder.

"This is fine quartz," Petri told him, extracting one of the jars. He unscrewed the lid and set it down on the counter. "We use it to make glass through transmutation. Have you learned about the difference between transformation and transmutation at school?"

"Not yet," said Harry. He didn't think transmutation had ever been touched upon. Professor McGonagall always focused them on transforming things with different aspects of similarity.

"Transformation is a completely magical process, and is instantaneous. The result can be anything, in theory. Transmutation changes one thing to another by accelerating a natural change. It is difficult, but guarantees quality. I only use it to fuse glass," Petri explained. He poured some quartz sand on the counter and pointed his wand at it. The crystals began to redden with what had to be incredible heat, but somehow the wooden counter underneath it remained completely unmarred.

After about a minute, there was a uniformly white-hot lump sitting on the counter, and Petri began to move his wand. The lump flowed sluggishly with his movements, thinning out and spinning in place until it had formed a small disc. Petri severed it neatly from the remainder of the glass, leaving a tail for the handle, and then, oddly enough, cast a steady hot-air charm on it.

"What's the hot-air charm for?" Harry asked.

"To protect the glass as it cools," Petri said. "If cooled too quickly, it could crack or warp."

He then proceeded to make a dozen more glass discs as Harry hung to the side, reluctantly impressed. This must have been what Petri used to do all day in the back of the shop in Germany while Harry watched it. He supposed all that glass had to come from _somewhere_.

"The odd-eye glass has a simple timed softening charm on it, looping repeatedly," Petri explained once the lenses had cooled. "When the glass softens, there will be irregular warping, and so things will look very strange."

They had covered the softening charm before the levitation charm at Hogwarts, and Harry was pleasantly surprised to find that he managed to enchant the glass without much trouble.

"Why was that so much easier than the animation enchantment?" he asked.

"Was it?" asked Petri. "Did you have trouble with the animation enchantment?"

"Well, it took me some time," Harry admitted.

"Perhaps you weren't focused enough on the effect you wanted," Petri suggested. He picked up the odd-eye glass Harry had enchanted and peered through it. "This seems to be working. It's only a toy, anyway. Why don't you practise on the rest?"

Naturally, Petri wanted him for free labour. There was nothing for it. Harry charmed the lenses while Petri fused more glass. When he had finished, Harry sifted through the pile to find the one that produced the most hilarious effects, and selected it as Vince's gift. He would have to send it out tonight.

"I don't know what to get for my other friend," Harry said. He didn't think Neville would appreciate a joke item like Vince would.

"And what is this friend of yours like?" asked Petri, putting a batch of marbles out to cool.

"He's sort of shy," said Harry, "and forgetful. He likes plants."

"Give him a portable planter," Petri said after a few moments.

"A what?"

Petri pointed at the top shelf to their right, where several egg-shaped glass containers in various sizes were on display.

"They're permeable and unbreakable, but still, not a very popular product," Petri said. "Ten sickles."

Of course Petri wasn't just going to give him one. "Can't I make one?"

"Unlikely," said Petri. "But perhaps you can practise your siphoning charm. Here. Fill these marbles with Gobwater."

Petri rummaged around in his trunk and produced a large canister of familiar-looking green liquid. Harry grimaced and took it from him.

"Don't open the bottle," Petri told him, "the smell is disgusting. Siphoning charm only. Put the finished ones in this bag."

Not opening the bottle still did not prevent Harry from getting the horrid liquid all over himself by the end of the evening, having filled what felt like hundreds of marbles. Harry never wanted to see a Gobstone ever again. After the first few spills Petri had packed up and told him to ask Rosenkol to side-along apparate him back home when he was finished.

Harry had tried to get revenge by not cleaning up before returning, but Rosenkol had taken one whiff of him before snapping his fingers and hitting him with such an abrasive scouring charm that Harry wished he'd just done it himself. He itched all over.

"Where do you keep the wrapping? For owl orders?" Harry asked when he finally made it home, dropping the heavy bag of marbles unceremoniously on the table in front of where Petri was sitting.

"The supply compartment in my trunk. It's unlocked," Petri told him without looking up. Harry huffed to himself and went to the trunk. It was mostly filled with quartz jars, and there was another bottle of that horrible Gobwater. He found the rolls of wrapping paper squished in a bottom corner, underneath a rack of vials with colourful sand.

Some colour-changing charms later, Harry had somewhat more festive red and green paper to wrap all his gifts.

It cost almost two sickles in owl fees to send them all off, and he wondered if he might be better off in the long run getting his own owl. He wouldn't even need to feed it, because they could hunt for themselves, couldn't they?

"Why don't we have an owl?" Harry asked Petri.

"I've never seen the need," said Petri. "They're easily intercepted. Rosenkol is much better for delivering sensitive messages. Anyway, I've been thinking. About the fidelius charm; I need to know more about this professor of yours. First, what is his name? Tell me everything you know about him."

"Er, he's Professor Quirrell. I'm not sure what his first name is; I think it starts with a Q. He teaches Defence Against the Dark Arts but he's pretty rubbish at it, at least in lessons. He showed me some other curses, er, he told me the vampire curse on me was getting worse, but I think he was lying."

"He showed you curses?" Petri repeated, eyes narrowing. "Privately?"

"Yeah," Harry said, wondering if it would've have been better to have omitted that part.

"What sorts of curses?" Petri asked, very slowly, as if he wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer.

"Like, er, the conjunctivitis curse," Harry said.

"And can you explain to me how the conjunctivitis curse works?" asked Petri.

"It makes your eyes swell up so you can't see," said Harry. Petri snorted without humour.

"I said how it works, not what it does," he said.

Harry thought about it for a long moment before he gracefully admitted that he had no idea. Petri sighed deeply.

"You'll be well on your way to prison if you don't be more careful," he said. "Don't cast spells you don't understand. The dark arts can easily get out of hand and cause unintended side-effects."

"So how _does_ it work, then?" Harry asked.

"I don't know," said Petri. "I have never needed it. It is for incapacitating large, magically resistant beasts, not casual use. On a human it might cause permanent blindness or even death."

Harry winced.

"Your professor was being utterly irresponsible, teaching spells without a solid theoretical grounding. There's no doubt he follows the old way of magic. I'm astonished that Dumbledore would allow a teacher like that to remain," said Petri.

"He doesn't teach anything like that in lessons," Harry said. "He's always stuttering and very hard to follow."

"He stutters?" Petri asked, sounding very incredulous. Harry blinked.

"Yes," he confirmed.

"Does he stutter incantations too?" Petri demanded.

"Well, no," said Harry. Come to think of it, that could lead to very bad results.

"None of this makes any sense," Petri said finally. "I need to see it for myself. When you return to school, can you get something of his and send it to me? A hair perhaps?"

"He's bald," said Harry.

"Of course he is," said Petri, not even sounding surprised. "If I could get his blood… but that's unlikely. If you see any opportunity to take something of his, even if it's a scrap of his clothing, then send that."

"Okay," Harry agreed. He didn't expect any such opportunity, and it sounded like Petri thought it was rather hopeless as well.

"I'm going to bed," Petri declared.

Harry downed a nutritive potion to quell his protesting stomach and decided that bed was not a bad idea.

Christmas morning dawned with a loud thump from above. Harry blinked blearily awake, recalled what day it was, and sprang out of bed to check the door.

It was just as he suspected—there were presents everywhere! A fine sheen of frost had formed over some of the packages, suggesting that owls had dropped them off some time in the night, but there were also some fresher looking ones that must have just arrived.

Shivering as the icy air finally caught up to him and overwhelmed his excitement, he bent down to collect as many presents as he could fit into his arms. There were small bundles from all his dorm mates and a large package from Hannah that must contain his promised Ravenclaw scarf. He shuttled these downstairs before running up to gather more.

"Happy Christmas to my Dear Neighbours! - Eldred," said the label on a box of lollipops. Harry glanced down their row to see that every coffin house had been visited with one of these. Shrugging, he brought it down along with the last three larger packages.

At this point, Petri had been roused by the commotion, and was slowly getting out of bed.

"There's one for you," Harry said with some surprise, tossing a small package onto Petri's lap.

The man immediately pushed it off and grabbed his wand to cast a spell-revealing charm at it. When it evidently came up clean, he opened it gingerly with a very precise severing charm. Harry looked on, curious as to what was inside.

A note fell out, along with a bright yellow packet that looked like it had come out of a muggle shop. Perhaps it had. Harry edged closer and saw that it was literally a pack of sherbet lemons from Tesco, much like the ones Dudley would go through on a daily basis.

"Charming," said Petri darkly, staring at the note in his hand, before crumpling it up.

"What?" Harry asked.

"Nothing you need concern yourself with," said Petri. "You can have those." He nodded to the sherbet lemons on his bed.

"They're not poisoned, are they?" Harry asked sceptically. Petri snorted. "We got other sweets too, from one of our neighbours. These ones." He showed Petri the lollipops.

"Those are blood pops," said Petri. "For vampires."

"Are they really blood flavoured?" Harry asked. He couldn't resist tearing the wrapper off one and trying it. There was definitely a metallic tang to it, but it also mostly tasted like sugar. "Not bad," he concluded.

He turned to the rest of his presents eagerly. He used to hate Christmastime, what with Dudley always being extra obnoxious despite being showered with gifts, and Harry having double the chores and then being locked in his cupboard. This was utterly different. Never had he got his own presents before, and now there were so many.

His housemates had sent him a variety of sweets for the most part, though Terry had sent the Christmas issue of _Martin Miggs._ Harry supposed that was what he got for making the mistake of showing an iota of interest in the series in front of the other boy. Stephen had got him a copy of _Ingrid's Ingredient Index_ , which he was sure would come in dead useful for Potions.

Hannah's package did indeed contain a scarf, but it was much nicer than he had expected. It looked more like a wearable tapestry, with a soaring bronze eagle against a blue background on one side, and "RAVENCLAW" emblazoned in bold letters on the other.

"You've made quite a few friends," Petri commented. "Is that hand-made?"

"We learned the knitting charm earlier," Harry explained.

"That's quite impressive," said Petri.

Harry blinked, surprised at the generous praise. He considered the scarf again. "Yeah, it's nice," he finally said, wrapping it around his neck. It was very warm, but he thought it would be foolish to take it right back off so he left it.

Neville's present was wrapped in a very bright golden paper with white snowflakes dancing all across it. It was very rectangular, suggesting that it was some sort of book. Harry made a small cut in the paper with the severing charm and peeled it back carefully.

It was indeed a book, _Household Horticulture_. A note had been spellotaped to the cover:

_Dear Harry,_

_Happy Christmas! I got you this book full of spells for growing crops. You can learn them and then we can ask Professor Sprout if we can help with the food greenhouse. Did you know Hogwarts grows all its own food and even sells some of it? Isn't that amazing?_

_\- Neville_

Hogwarts grew all its own food? Harry was definitely intrigued. Could they grow their own food too? Speaking of food, "It's Christmas," he said aloud. "Can we eat real food?"

"And where will we get this food?" Petri asked. That was a fair point. Everything was probably closed, and anyway, Harry did not even know where there might be a grocer. He'd never seen one in Knockturn Alley.

"Does everyone just drink nutritive potions?" he demanded. "No way. My friends have never even heard of them. If not today, then maybe tomorrow we can go to the grocery store."

Petri sighed. "Fine. Tomorrow, I will send Rosenkol. I needn't remind you, do I, that he is utterly incapable of cooking?"

"I can do it," said Harry. "Anything is better than those potions."

He put Neville's book to the side and grabbed Vince's present next. It was large and very inelegantly wrapped, perhaps owing to its odd, lumpy shape. Harry opened it up and then recoiled as what appeared to be a desiccated, discoloured human head rolled out.

"Bloody hell!" he yelled. Behind him, there was an audible slap as Petri covered his mouth to muffle a laugh.

Harry took a closer look at the head. There was no mistake. It was an actual shrunken head. He'd seen them before, in the shop across the street, but that didn't mean he understood the point of their existence.

"Why would anybody want one of these?" he demanded. "What am I supposed to do with it?"

"Howdy!" said the head in a strange accent, right through its sewn-up lips. Harry choked.

"It talks," he muttered with faint nausea.

"It's not real," said Petri. "Real ones are outlawed. Ones like yours are used as rather macabre alarm clocks."

"Ugh," said Harry. "I definitely don't need to wake up to that."

All Vince's note said was, "Happy Christmas!"

Harry tossed it aside and reached for the last present, giving the shrunken head wide berth. He wondered who this one was from. Probably the same person who had given Petri the sherbet lemons, judging by the brown paper and the loopy "Harry" on the front.

The package was soft and light, and when he tore it open, something silky flowed out like quicksilver and pooled in his lap. Harry took it and held it up. It was a translucent, shimmering cloak.

"An invisibility cloak," Petri said immediately.

"How does it work?" Harry asked when he attempted to put it on, and did not appear to be invisible. It pooled generously around his feet, obviously made to be floor-length on somebody much taller. A note fluttered out of the folds and he reached down to snatch it between two fingers. "Your father left this in my possession before he died. It is time it was returned to you. Use it well," he read aloud. "There's no name."

"Dumbledore," said Petri with certainty. Harry glanced over to the sherbet lemons.

"Dumbledore also sent you the sweets?" he asked, trying to compare the handwriting on the two packages in his head. Petri nodded jerkily.

"Weird. So how does this work?" he asked again.

"Put your arms underneath it," Petri recommended. Harry drew back his hands and let the edges of the cloak overlap. The effect was instantaneous—his whole body disappeared from view.

"Wicked!" He reached back and pulled the hood over his head. Unlike on a regular cloak, it was extremely long and covered his whole face and then some. He could see reasonably well through it, though everything had a slight shimmer. "Am I totally invisible?"

"Quite," said Petri. "Though hardly undetectable." He tapped his spectacles. "The piercing-eye enchantment can see under it if I know your position, though it's a rather rare spell so you'll hardly need to worry about it."

"But there's also the human revealing charm, right?" said Harry, promptly managing to inhale some of the cloak. He spat it out and ducked his head to prevent a repeat.

"That's right," said Petri.

"Is there any way to counter it?" Harry asked.

"Not that I know of," Petri said. "You could, of course, confound or memory charm the caster. Or outrun the range of the charm, if you move quickly."

"Hmm," said Harry. "Can I learn the silencing charm?"

"For what purpose?"

"Er, to silence my footsteps."

Petri shook his head. "Likely not. The charm is very difficult, and applies either to sounds emanating from a target or passing a fixed point. Footsteps come from both your shoes and the ground, while you're moving. Better perhaps to cushion or soften the soles of your shoes to dampen the sound."

"Oh, that's a good idea," said Harry.

"And just what are you planning to use all this for?" asked Petri, raising an eyebrow.

"Er, dunno," said Harry. "Maybe I can spy on Professor Quirrell."

"That… may be informative. I had been planning to scry on him, but if you can see him while he believes he is alone, and share your memory, that would be just as good. Actually, can you share some memories with me now?"

"Share memories?" Harry repeated. "How?"

"In the pensieve," Petri said impatiently, getting to his feet and going to his trunk.

Despite having used the pensieve for necromantic purposes several times already, Harry had never done anything with his own memories.

"So how does this work?" he asked, when they arrived at the workshop and Petri retrieved the heavy bowl from its locked cabinet.

"There's a charm that converts your thoughts into liquid form," Petri said. Harry thought that that sounded somewhat familiar. "You only need to focus on the memory you want to share. Try thinking on where you were and what you were doing at the start of the memory, and then think about the end."

"Wait. Will I still remember it after?" Harry demanded.

"I will only be making a copy," Petri assured him.

"So you want to see one of my meetings with him?" Harry asked.

"That would be fine," said Petri. Harry thought back to the lesson on the conjunctivitis curse, which Petri had already told him off about. He might as well show that one.

Petri touched his wand tip to Harry's temple and then pulled. Harry closed his eyes to avoid getting distracted, and thought about the Professor Quirrell and the attacking snake. His head felt oddly cool and prickly, like he was taking a cold shower.

He opened his eyes as the strange feeling ended, and saw that Petri had a long, shuddering strand of silver liquid suspended from the wand. He moved it over the pensieve and it fell and pooled inside.

Harry, curious as to what his memory looked would look like from the outside, asked, "Can I see too?"

Petri beckoned for him to go on the other side of the pensieve. They both lowered their faces into the bowl.

Harry found himself falling in a familiar way through darkness, then mist, and then he was just outside Professor Quirrell's office, looking right at himself. He yelped and stepped back, but his past self did not react, and only flicked his wand to check the time. It was five minutes past seven thirty.

The first thing Harry noticed as he looked around was that the surroundings in this memory were much crisper and clearer than in any of the ones he had reconstructed through necromancy. He could see each stone in the wall just as clearly as if he were there.

"He's coming around the corner soon," Harry said as Petri appeared without any warning beside him. Fortunately, they seemed to be able to hear each other just fine, as Petri nodded sharply.

Indeed, Professor Quirrell appeared at the end of the hall, and Harry saw himself frown. Once more, he noted that the man had approached from the right.

"There's a forbidden part of the corridor on that side," Harry told Petri. He hadn't thought too much of it at the time, but perhaps Professor Quirrell wasn't permitted there either. "Forbidden to students. I don't know if he was supposed to be there or not."

Harry and Petri followed Professor Quirrell and past-Harry into the office, passing partly through them. It didn't feel any different from walking through air, but Harry shuddered nonetheless. He watched as Professor Quirrell asked him about the Enemy's Curse, and his past self showed him the foe glass he had found in the room of rubbish.

"I wish we could see what Professor Quirrell sees in there," said Harry, observing how all the blood seemed to drain from the professor's face as he peered into the glass. "Wait, this is my memory, right? Can somebody else see my enemies like this?"

"No," said Petri. "The pensieve is enchanted to construct an accurate representation of reality from the memory. That means a third party cannot see the results of any magic they would not normally be privy to."

Professor Quirrell began to tell Harry about the conjunctivitis curse, and how it might be used on Silviu, and Petri snorted.

"That's as likely to work as casting an engorgement charm at his face. Your professor is an imbecile, or purposely trying to mislead you. Likely the latter."

"Wait, why? The engorgement charm is reversible by _finite_ , though," Harry protested.

"It won't work at all! Have you learned nothing?" Petri said derisively. "Overpowering a sentient creature's will, to hurt them, is prohibitively difficult! Curses are specially designed work through methods other than direct intent, and to be difficult to reverse. If you try to cast them through brute force you are losing all the features that make them curses in the first place."

"Professor Quirrell told me that the difference between curses and other charms was that curses need intent," said Harry.

"That's—that's _completely off_ ," said an agitated Petri. "If anything, curses need more technique and less intent. What purpose could he have to—" Petri stopped mid-sentence to stare slackly at Professor Quirrell's desk. Harry glanced over to see what had surprised him, but all that was happening was the professor was demonstrating the spell on a snake.

Petri then turned his incredulous expression on Harry.

"What?" said Harry.

"You speak Parseltongue," he said flatly.

"What?" Harry repeated.

"You can speak to snakes," Petri said.

"It's a talking snake," Harry protested. Petri's nostrils flared in frustration.

"No you fool, it's a regular snake!" he cried. "You can speak to snakes, and so can this professor of yours."

"Er, okay, so?" Harry had heard the snake speaking English, clear as day, but he could see no reason why Petri would lie about something like this, and so had to attribute it to some kind of magical phenomenon similar to the visibility of thestrals.

"So, the last known living parselmouth was the Dark Lord. It's a bloodline ability," said Petri.

"Are you saying I'm related to the Dark Lord?" Harry demanded incredulously.

"No, of course not," said Petri, dragging his fingers through his hair. "That's unlikely. Your mother was a mudblood."

"What about Professor Quirrell?" Harry asked.

"The Dark Lord is still alive," Petri said, taking a few steps forward and then pivoting on his heel to pace between the memory desk and door.

They were suddenly engulfed in mist and ejected from the pensieve, and Harry had to brace himself against the edge of the table to avoid falling. Petri surfaced, and as if mid-stride, pitched forward and nearly sent himself back into the memory again.

"The Dark Lord is still alive," he said again, righting himself. "So your professor may well be the Dark Lord himself."

"Didn't he have relatives?" Harry asked weakly, though he felt that the possibility that Professor Quirrell was actually the Dark Lord fit all too nicely into the space made by all his unanswered questions.

"I don't know," Petri admitted. "I certainly have never heard of any heirs, but it's possible."

"How do we find out?" Harry asked, trying to focus on what they could do, rather than what they couldn't.

Petri did not answer for a while, obviously deep in thought.

"This may be a foolish idea," he said at length. "Ask him, or better yet, have him offer to show you the killing curse. More than once, if possible."

"What?" Harry demanded. "How's that going to help?"

"The Dark Lord is well-known for his ability to cast the killing curse repeatedly, and to successfully kill anything with it, no matter how large or magical," Petri explained. "With of course, you as the only exception. It is an incredibly intensive curse. I'm uncertain if I could even reliably kill a human with it. I have heard that his followers attempted to emulate him by also using it whenever they could, but to my knowledge nobody has come close to matching his prowess."

"Oh," said Harry. "Er, wow. So how did I survive?"

"Nobody knows," said Petri. "But perhaps your Parseltongue talent has something to do with your survival? I don't have the faintest idea as to whether this is possible, but perhaps somehow the killing curse made you magically related to him. The killing curse is supposed to interrupt the connection between the body and the magical flow by creating a false connection, so you were in effect connected to him for a moment. Maybe some of that connection still remains."

"My headache!" Harry said suddenly. "I always get a headache when I'm around Professor Quirrell. Here, around my scar." He tapped his forehead. "You don't think..."

Petri's face was grim. "We can't know for certain yet," he said, "but it does seem more and more likely that this man really is the Dark Lord. If he and you are connected, it might also explain why the fidelius charm is malfunctioning."

"What if he tries to kill me again?" Harry said, his heart suddenly racing. He felt cold and cramped, like he was in a stone box, already dead and buried.

"He hasn't tried yet," Petri pointed out more calmly. "He clearly has some sort of interest in you."

"The Dark Lord is interested in me," Harry muttered faintly. "What if he's trying to figure out how I survived the killing curse, and when he figures it out he's going to kill me?"

"That's… a possibility, unfortunately," said Petri.

"Can't we do something?" Harry asked. "Call the aurors?"

Petri snorted. "It's almost trivial to escape aurors, and I doubt the combined auror force could defeat the Dark Lord if he were to fight. There is really very little that can stop a talented wizard."

"What about Headmaster Dumbledore?" Harry asked. "Isn't he a great wizard too?"

"That's right. Dumbledore," said Petri, frowning. "Hogwarts is practically Dumbledore's stronghold. So he knows."

"What?"

"I can't imagine that Dumbledore does not know that the Dark Lord is there. He must have some sort of plan," Petri said.

"He knows the Dark Lord is in the school and he's just, doing nothing?" Harry cried, a little indignant. "What if the man goes on a rampage and kills all the students?"

"What would he gain from doing such a thing?" Petri asked, eyebrows raised. "The Dark Lord hoped for a united magical world, completely separate from muggles. He's hardly going to destroy the future of the wizarding world for no reason."

Harry frowned. "But then why is he even there?" he asked. "He's just pretending to be a teacher. Not even a good teacher."

"I have no guesses," said Petri. "He must want something from Hogwarts, but it could be anything."

"What if it's me?" Harry asked. "What if he wants to kidnap me and, and do experiments on me?"

Perhaps he'd been kidnapped a few too many times in his life, Harry thought grimly, so that the possibility seemed all-too salient.

"How did you meet?" Petri asked, frowning. "Outside of lessons. Did he approach you?"

Harry tried to think back. "Er, I'm not sure, I don't—oh. Er, no. We met sort of by accident. So maybe that's not it."

He recalled now the matter of Nic's book. It had been complete happenstance that Harry had been in that corridor looking for Professor Babbling, and that Professor Quirrell had caught him trying to open the door to the forbidden corridor instead, and also helped him retrieve the book.

Harry had loaned that book to him and not yet got it back. More precisely, the Dark Lord, possibly, had _asked_ to borrow it. He'd claimed it was to better teach Harry that obscure protection of blood curse, but even at the time, Harry had thought it was an odd choice. Now he doubted that it had been more than an excuse to get the book. But why?

He hadn't planned to have the book, Harry was sure, because it was only a coincidence that he knew Harry had it. But he must have thought the book would be useful to him. Was he trying to do some other piece of sympathetic magic?

But no. The book discussed sympathetic magic, but that wasn't what it was really about. It was really about creating a philosopher's stone, and getting eternal life.

"Wait," Harry muttered, glancing up at Petri, who had remained silent for a while now. "Do you, er, have you heard of something called a philosopher's stone? I think, er, Professor Quirrell brought it up once."

"The philosopher's stone?" Petri repeated, eyebrows rising into his hairline. "It's said to be the pinnacle of alchemical creation, a perfect union of preservation and acceleration. Those are the two branches of alchemy. It can create elixirs that will delay physical death, theoretically forever."

"Does it exist?" Harry asked.

"It exists," said Petri. "Dumbledore's alchemy master, Nicolas Flamel, is the only known person to have successfully created one. He was over six hundred years old, though word is that he died recently, just a few months ago."

"What?" said Harry, because there were too many thoughts chasing each other around his head and he couldn't articulate any of them. Nicolas Flamel, creator of the philosopher's stone had to be Nic, who had sent him a book about creating the philosopher's stone. He had been _six hundred_? And now, suddenly, he was dead?

"I don't know if it's true," said Petri. "Rumours like that sometimes circulate for awhile before we find out that they're false."

"But what about the stone?" Harry asked. "If he's dead, doesn't that mean something happened to the stone?"

"Oh," Petri murmured thoughtfully. "We can find out. Object scrying is trivial with such a well-known unique object."

"Scrying, like seeing what it's doing right now?" Harry asked.

"Seeing where it is," Petri said. "And perhaps even where it will be."

He walked over to one of the locked cabinets and twisted his wand in a complicated motion. It swung open and revealed an array of crystal balls in different sizes. He selected a medium one and brought it back to set beside the pensieve.

Then he just looked at it. When Harry tried to ask what he was doing, he only raised a hand to shush him and continued staring into the foggy depths of the ball.

About a minute later, he did a double take and leaned in close, blinking rapidly.

"What?" Harry asked, leaning in, as if he would be able to see what it showed, but there was only swirling smoke.

"It's at Hogwarts," Petri whispered in disbelief. "The philosopher's stone is at Hogwarts."


	30. Stalker

The winter holiday felt like it had ended even before it had begun, and Harry barely managed to squeeze in all his essays in between Petri's catch-up lessons on animating dead mice and the chaos that followed the opening of the shop.

They had concluded that there was literally nothing to be done about the probable Dark Lord, who was obviously at Hogwarts to get his hands on the philosopher's stone, which was likely some sort of trap that Dumbledore had set up.

"Try to stay away from him," Petri had suggested, and Harry was keen on following that advice.

The problem was that Professor Quirrell seemed to have recovered from his illness by the time term started, and was eager to resume their supposed lessons. Harry had no choice but to attend the first one, but he figured he needed to find an excuse to get out of future meetings as soon as he could.

"You've shown me quite a few curses, sir," Harry told Professor Quirrell, after a session where he began to learn the reductor curse, and had met with only limited success. "I think I should spend more time practising them before I learn any new ones. And I don't want to waste too much of your time."

"Oh it's no p-problem at all," Professor Quirrell said, before Harry could suggest that they hold off on further sessions. "I q-quite enjoy our little lessons."

The Dark Lord enjoyed giving him lessons. Right. If he really was the Dark Lord.

"Of course we can review the spells we've already covered, if you'd prefer that," said Professor Quirrell.

Harry supposed that he might as well get the most out of the tutoring, if he had to attend. "I'd actually like to learn more, er, theory about some spells, sir. Like the conjunctivitis curse. How does it actually work? I mean, I know what it does, obviously, but how does it do it?"

He half expected Professor Quirrell to say something involving the "intent" that he seemed so fond of. Perhaps he had some motive for misleading Harry, or Petri had been mistaken about this particular curse. Instead, the man sort of smiled, but in a horribly stiff way, like his face did not belong to him.

"You're in Ravenclaw, I suppose, so I can't simply tell you that it _just works_. The theory is much more complicated than the practice, and I will try not to lose myself in the details. First: do you know how most dark spells are invented?" Professor Quirrell asked.

"Er, no sir," said Harry.

"The majority of them are lucky, or perhaps unlucky, accidents. No doubt you experienced accidental magic as a young child. It's unlikely that it did exactly what you wanted, or even accomplished anything."

Harry supposed that was true, thinking back on when he had turned his teacher's wig blue. That hadn't earned him anything more than a moment's satisfaction and a week's worth of detentions and being locked up in the cupboard under the stairs.

"But sometimes, I hope, it did do something useful, and you might have wanted to replicate the effect. The most foolproof way to do it would be to break the effect into smaller parts, and construct it out of many spells that you already know, to create a new spell that does exactly what you want. But once the spell exists, it isn't immutable, and another wizard might take it and achieve a similar effect, as if it were a guided accident. That's why I have been teaching you curses without explaining all the minutiae of them. That way, the curse becomes your own. Why should you have to cast it according to another wizard's instructions, after all, when the magic comes from _you_?" Professor Quirrell's voice had got intensely quiet by the end, and there was a whispering, almost sibilant quality to it. Harry wondered, all of a sudden, whether he had been speaking Parseltongue.

"That makes sense, sir," Harry said, and it did, but what Petri had told him also made a sort of opposite sense. What was the point in learning a spell if you couldn't get it to do what it was supposed to do? "But wouldn't the conjunctivitis curse, say, take quite a bit of will, or intent, to manage? What if you just want to cast it while you're not panicked, or desperate?"

"Do not confuse affect with intent," said Professor Quirrell. "Feelings like desperation serve to force one desire to the forefront of your mind, but are unnecessary. To truly have intent to do something is just to know exactly what you want. Magic is a natural extension of desire. Only when your desires are conflicting or confused, do you have a failure of intent."

"Is that sort of like sympathetic magic again, sir?" Harry asked.

"That's right. Wizards have been studying for centuries to imitate a function that comes naturally to almost every other magical species. Of course, all non-humans are constrained greatly by instinct, and so can never have the full breadth of a wizard's potential. Humans, too, have instincts which we must be careful to control."

This view, at least, Harry had heard of from Petri, but he still wasn't sure if he believed it. Sure, there were magical creatures that were sort of like animals, but there were also goblins and hags and other such sentient beings, and even vampires, who were transformed from humans! Why should they be any more constrained than wizards?

He nodded anyway, because he had no plans to disagree with the Dark Lord's philosophy to his face.

"I digress," said Professor Quirrell. "With all this in mind I can tell you more about the conjunctivitis curse."

Professor Quirrell had been right at the outset—the way the curse was actually supposed to work was rather complicated. Instead of directly swelling the eyes, the magic began only by locating them, and then it conjured an irritant, which produced eye-watering and swelling. The swelling could then be aided by the curse's original intent, as the body's will would now be aligned, to extend to uncomfortable or even horrific proportions. Because the curse involved a nearly microscopic conjuration, it was almost impossible to reverse through spellwork.

Harry had to admit that it sort of was the case that hearing more about the curse made him less confident that he could cast it, even though he had done it before. What if what he had managed was only a facsimile of the real thing? It was a frustrating sort of thought that wouldn't go away once he'd had it.

Professor Quirrell secured an agreement for another meeting before Harry could come up with an appropriate excuse. The problem was that anything he could do to fill up that time only meant that Professor Quirrell would try a different time. It wasn't as if Harry could be doing scheduled activities all week long, and his homework, while copious, did not occupy close to all his free time.

Harry decided that if avoidance wasn't going to work after all, then he needed to find out once and for all whether the man really was the Dark Lord, and what he was about. He thought about tailing the man while invisible, but there was always the threat of the human-revealing spell, which Professor Quirrell had already proven himself paranoid enough to cast on the night of the troll incident. Instead, he came up with the better idea of snooping about in the man's rooms. After all, he knew where they were, and he knew that Professor Quirrell would not be in them when he had lessons to teach.

The only concern was that there might be some sort of alarm, sort of like a muggle burglar alarm. He asked Elaine about it in charms club.

"Hey, is there any charm that tells you when someone's gone somewhere? Like stepped through a door, maybe?"

"Well, you could tag them with a tracking charm, or set up a surveillance enchantment," she suggested. "I think those are sort of illegal, though, unless you own the place."

"Er, I was thinking more like an alarm," Harry said quickly.

"There's the caterwauling charm. It makes this right awful scream as soon as you go into its area. People use it on their houses sometimes, to stop thieves," Elaine said.

"But you have to be there to hear it, right?" Harry confirmed.

"Well, yeah," she said. "I don't think there's a way to get notified from far away. Well, maybe if you had a protean charm on something glass, and then you used the caterwauling charm—that thing can shatter windows if you set it loud enough..." And then she was off, muttering theories to herself. Harry decided that it was unlikely that Professor Quirrell would be able to catch him breaking in from afar.

The question now was when his lessons coincided with one of Harry's free periods. He couldn't just ask for an older student's schedule for no reason, so he tried some basic subterfuge.

"Hey, Robert," he asked the prefect when he found him lounging about in the common room.

"Yeah?"

"I was wondering, do you know when Professor Quirrell isn't teaching during the day? I've got a question for him and I keep missing him after the lesson," Harry said.

Robert didn't seem to think much on how unlikely this was, but he said, "Why don't you ask him after hours?"

"I'm lazy and I don't want to walk all the way to his office then," Harry pretended to complain, "And what if he's not there? I was hoping I could stop by during a free period."

"Well, I only know I've got lessons with him Mondays and Fridays at two thirty," Robert said.

"Just twice a week?" Harry asked.

"Yeah, it's nice. After fourth year you don't have nearly as many lessons for our core subjects. I mean you've got your electives and everything. Third year is the worst because you have pretty much the same schedule as you firsties do now, but with electives stacked on top," Robert told him.

Harry nodded. "Sounds rough," he agreed, but Robert had already turned back to the book he'd been reading.

Friday at two thirty, luckily, was right after the afternoon Potions lesson ended. It was the last lesson of the week, and nobody would question it if he went off somewhere on his own. He hardly spent time in the distant common room during the day, anyway. The first years had finally realised after a few weeks that it was a complete waste of time to make multiple trips back and forth. Mandy, who was a numbers sort, had estimated that it was a twenty-minute detour on average to stop by the common room before going somewhere else.

Harry brought his cloak with him to the potions lesson, and went over his plan repeatedly all throughout. This was unwise, as his distracted state almost caused him to blow up his potion by adding an ingredient too early. Only Hannah's rapid intervention saved him from being eviscerated by Professor Snape, and failing them both—it was a paired potion today.

"Harry!" Hannah hissed, letting go of his arm. "Stop daydreaming. You'll give me a heart attack."

"Sorry," Harry whispered, shaking his head and reading the instructions again. They were to add the chopped valerian root _after_ stirring in the lavender oil six times anticlockwise.

While Hannah stirred, he tried to chop his root into more aesthetically pleasing chunks.

"You should probably stop cutting that," said Hannah. "It says chopped, not diced."

Harry picked up the rather unevenly distributed pieces with the flat of his knife and scooped them into the cauldron.

Miraculously, he managed to get through the rest of the practical without ruining anything, and split from the rest of the Ravenclaws by claiming that he needed to go to the loo.

He did actually go to the loo, and as soon as he certified that it was empty, pulled his invisibility cloak out of his expanded pockets like a muggle stage magician and swept it over his shoulders. Checking in the mirror that he was indeed invisible, he paused to cast some softening charms on the soles of his shoes, stomped his feet a few times to ascertain that the sound was sufficiently dampened, and exited to begin his mission.

Avoiding people in the halls while invisible was a little more difficult than he'd anticipated. He should have just waited the ten minutes between lessons for the corridors to clear out some, but it was too late. He practised dodging streams of inattentive students moving at high speed, and once had to evade right into the Gryffindor house ghost, which was decidedly unpleasant. It was as if someone had dunked him in ice water, but worse, because he felt immediately soaked through to his bones.

"Who's there?" asked the ghost, turning his head too quickly so that it flopped off his neck. Harry grimaced and hurried away.

"Who's there? Who's there?" a singsong voice yelled at the end of the corridor. A swirling blob of colour zoomed into view, slowing to reveal a floating boy with distorted features, dressed in fool's clothing. He was clutching something undoubtedly unpleasant in his green-gloved hands.

It was, most certainly, the school poltergeist, Peeves. Somehow, Harry had managed to go a whole term without ever seeing him. According to the prefects, for some reason or other he seemed partial to terrorising the Gryffindors and the Slytherins over the other houses, at least whenever the Bloody Baron wasn't around.

"He shows up when people are making trouble," Penelope had theorised.

Harry thought she might be onto something there. What were the odds that he had his first encounter exactly the first time he was doing something illicit?

Well, he wasn't breaking any rules yet, actually. It was his free period, so he wasn't skipping lessons, and surely there was no rule against walking around while invisible?

Holding his head high, though of course nobody could see, Harry turned right back around to try and find a different route to the third floor. One of the moving staircases would take him there, eventually.

Luckily, he had moved just in time to avoid a dungbomb that Peeves had chucked at the wall near his prior position. It exploded in a rancid brown burst mere meters behind him, and the poltergeist cackled in delight, winding up for another throw. Harry hurried further out of range before casting some scouring charms at the hem of his cloak. He didn't want to take any chances.

He made it the rest of the way to Professor Quirrell's office without incident, thankfully. The door was locked, but yielded to a simple unlocking charm, and then he was in front of the entrance that was disguised as a wall.

"Peppercorn," he said, but nothing happened. He bit his lip. Of course the professor had changed his password by now. In fact, he'd probably changed it right after Harry's first visit. Well, there was no chance that he was going to be able to guess the new one. Unreasonably irritated, Harry abandoned the office hurriedly, barely remembering to lock it behind him, and stalked down the corridor.

He paused at the intersection. The forbidden corridor was right there, and obviously it wasn't dangerous just to look in briefly, because Professor Quirrell had done it right in front of him. Draco Malfoy had seen behind it too, Harry was almost certain, though the boy had denied it when questioned, claiming that Professor Snape had caught them and given them detention before they could get a proper look. Vince had been altogether too cagey about the subject for that to have been the whole truth, but Harry hadn't cared enough to press.

Now, though, he was invisible and had plenty of vision down the corridor. If somebody came he could run back around the bend, remove his cloak, and pretend he had been waiting at Professor Quirrell's office the whole time.

Confidence bolstered by this plan, he stepped up to the door and tried the handle cautiously. Locked, as he expected.

" _Alohamora_ ," he whispered, wiggling his wand in an S-shape and then flicking it sharply downwards. The door gave a satisfying click, and he tugged it open a crack.

It was totally dark inside, but a low, rumbling growl reached his ears as soon as the creaking of the hinges ceased. As he peered into the gloom, he saw three pairs of lamp-like yellow eyes glaring in his direction, and the edge of a great, furry paw bigger than he was.

Feeling daring, he whispered, " _lumos_ ," and stuck his wand tip out carefully to cast the beam out. The growling immediately escalated to a roar, and Harry withdrew his wand and slammed the door shut, rubbing at his chest to calm his spiking heart rate.

That had been a little foolish, but totally wicked, he thought. He locked the door and tugged his cloak around him more securely to make sure he was still invisible, before he backed away into the side corridor.

So now he knew what was behind that door—some kind of gigantic, three-headed beast. He thought it might be a dog, if such a plebeian word could apply to something so eldritch.

If the philosopher's stone were really somewhere in there, he supposed the dog was serving as a guard. It seemed like an effective deterrent for thieves. Harry was certainly not taking one step into that room.

But why had the Dark Lord not made his move yet? Petri had claimed that the man could cast a killing curse that could kill anything. He wouldn't even have to get within ten feet of the giant dog. It wasn't exactly a difficult target to aim at.

Maybe he was concerned about other protections? Petri had said that the stone seemed to be inside a mirror, somehow, in a chamber guarded by fire. Harry hadn't seen any fire, so he could only conclude that there was a whole series of protections. Scrying for them all was probably not possible, since one could apparently only scry for an immediate or a general location, and not every detail in between.

What now? His plan of getting into the professor's rooms had totally failed, so he would have to try something else, or perhaps get his hands on the password somehow. Maybe after next week's evening session, he could pretend to leave, immediately put on his cloak, and eavesdrop until Professor Quirrell went inside his rooms? That might actually work.

For how, he decided to go to the library and do some of his homework, so that he wouldn't have to worry about it later. He remained invisible for the fun of it, and for practice, though there weren't so many people walking about in the halls at the moment.

As he passed by the staffroom on the ground floor, he heard voices emanating from the door, which was ajar, and he could not resist stopping to listen. It was difficult to hear, so he pressed up against the door frame and edged himself through the crack. Success. He was inside.

The staffroom was long and rectangular, with green armchairs and glass tea tables laid out like chairs and desks in a classroom. A tall, ancient wardrobe stood in a corner at one end, beside a relatively pristine chalk board. Professor McGonagall was speaking to Professor Flitwick in hushed tones in front of the board.

"…unacceptable amount of time overseeing detentions," she said, shaking her head.

"If only they let us have another set of turns," Prfoessor Flitwick murmured.

"Filius!" Professor McGonagall said sternly, "That's hardly the solution!"

"Perhaps if you would take points more often, it wouldn't be a problem. I always said the house points give the wrong incentives to teachers," Professor Flitwick grumbled.

"I've been trying to delegate," said Professor McGonagall. "Argus has been a great help but he only has so many daylight hours."

"So you're the one blocking up his schedule!" Professor Flitwick exclaimed, crossing his arms. "He gave mine to Hagrid."

"Hagrid?" Professor McGonagall repeated, aghast. "Is that safe?"

"He brought them into to the forest." Professor Flitwick sighed and rubbed at his goatee. "They were fifth years, though. Should be able to handle anything in there."

"I'll know to expect parental complaints soon," said Professor McGonagall dryly. "Hagrid's got a good heart, but you can't deny he's a little..."

Just then, the door opened up all the way and Professor Snape stalked in, looking very dishevelled. He slammed the door behind him. Harry jumped to the side at the last minute, only narrowly dodging out of the way.

That couldn't be right. Professor Snape was supposed to still be teaching. Harry knew for certain that there was another potions lesson after his. Had something happened?

"Rough day, Severus?" asked Professor McGonagall.

"In half an hour, my classroom will be completely covered in paralysing sludge," said Professor Snape, as if he were forecasting the weather.

"You should give your detentions to Severus," Professor Flitwick suggested. Professor McGonagall snorted.

"I'm sure he already has it covered," she said.

"The Weasley menaces still owe me a month of Saturday evenings," Professor Snape ground out vindictively as he lowered himself into an armchair and swung his bag up onto his lap, extracting a stack of parchments and a quill.

Harry glanced to the closed door nervously. How was he going to get out without alerting the professors that somebody was there? He ought to have stayed outside.

"I wish we could give detentions where they mark papers," said Professor McGonagall.

"Detention?" Professor Flitwick exclaimed, as if scandalised, "Make it a reward! I tell my sixth years that they can get experience and extra credit if they help me."

Professor McGonagall groaned. "You lucky bastard," she muttered.

"Marking is marginally entertaining," said Professor Snape, not pausing in his bloody evisceration of an unlucky student's essay. "Listen to this one. 'The Wit-Sharpening Potion makes your wit sharper.' I definitely couldn't have deduced _that_ from the name. 'It can make it easier to hurt others with words.' Not even Wit-Sharpening Potion is enough to save this imbecile."

Professor McGonagall covered her mouth to stifle a giggle.

"Submitted by a Gryffindor, of course," Professor Snape added, sneering.

"Oh, don't act as if your Slytherins are any better," said Professor McGonagall.

Harry edged closer to the door, so that he was standing beside it but not in the way in case somebody opened it suddenly. He was counting on slipping out behind the next person who came inside.

Unfortunately, that next person was Professor Quirrell, and Harry flinched at the sudden stab of pain in his scar as the man squeezed inside through the tiniest crack and shut the door ever-so-gently behind him.

Professor Quirrell _definitely_ had a lesson to teach right now. There was no way the period was over yet. Had his classroom exploded as well?

"Hello," Professor Quirrell said rather weakly, glancing about the room before choosing a seat in one of the corners. Professor Snape did not even look up as he passed by.

"Hello Quirinus," Professor Flitwick greeted. "Should we break out the tea?"

"Let's wait for Albus," said Professor McGonagall.

"He's coming today?" asked Professor Flitwick. "I thought—"

"The Wizengamot session was cancelled, I heard," said Professor McGonagall.

Oh no. Harry realised that he must have stumbled into the start of some sort of staff meeting. On the one hand, it meant he had more opportunities to slip out as other teachers arrived. On the other hand, he had a strong and ridiculous urge to eavesdrop some more, even though he reckoned it was likely to be boring.

Eventually, sense won out after a rather close battle inside his head. He could eavesdrop from outside, so that he could leave at any time.

The door opened wide and Headmaster Dumbledore entered with a regal gait, his orange high-heeled boots clicking against the stone floor. Harry seized the opportunity to slip past as quietly as he could, but it had been unnecessary—Professor Dumbledore left the door open. Harry leaned up against the wall outside and decided that he felt much better being out of there.

There was a chorus of greetings from inside, and a pop and the clattering of china as the headmaster evidently ordered tea for everyone.

"Pomona won't be joining us, unfortunately," Albus said. "She's out of time. We're only waiting on Rubeus."

And then Harry had to press himself against the wall as the giant form of the gamekeeper trudged past.

A few moments later, there was a thump and the sound of shattering glass.

"He's fainted!" said Professor McGonagall. " _Rennervate!_ It's not working. Albus, you try."

"My dear, too energetic a reviving spell may do more harm than good," said the headmaster.

"I'll let Poppy know," said Professor Flitwick. " _Expecto patronum!_ Tell Poppy, come to the staff room, Quirinus collapsed again."

A silver streak shot out the door, too fast for Harry to make out its form. He peered inside cautiously. All the professors except Snape were huddled in the corner, hovering over Professor Quirrell, who appeared to have passed out in his chair.

"You don't think we should just take him to the hospital wing?" Professor McGonagall asked.

"Best not to move him before we know what's wrong," said Professor Flitwick.

Professor Snape looked like he'd rather go back to marking his papers, but knew well enough that it would be inappropriate.

Madam Pomfrey arrived soon enough, and shooed the professors out of the way before waving her wand over Professor Quirrell.

"It's just like last time," she muttered. "There's nothing wrong with him except that his body seems on the verge of falling apart."

"A side effect of dark arts misuse," Professor Snape suggested.

"Now, now, Severus. Let's not accuse him who cannot defend himself," Professor Dumbledore admonished. Professor Snape scoffed, and turned mulishly back to his stack of essays.

"I've never seen anything like it," said Madam Pomfrey. "It doesn't seem to be getting worse, so for now I'd say let him sleep it off."

"Sleep it off," Professor Snape mouthed to himself, rolling his eyes.

Well, if Professor Quirrell was really the Dark Lord, then he was clearly not in a good state. It raised the question of why Professor Dumbledore did not just seize the moment and capture him, or even off him. Could Petri be wrong about the assumption that Dumbledore knew everything that was going on? Then again, it seemed very unlikely that the headmaster would put a sought-after item like the philosopher's stone in Hogwarts without expecting some attempts at thievery. He was most certainly on his guard.

Maybe he was an honourable sort. Hadn't Petri mentioned being pardoned for crimes after some war by Dumbledore (who, Harry had to remind himself, was apparently some kind of international authority in addition to being a school headmaster)? That had obviously been a big mistake.

Madam Pomfrey levitated Professor Quirrell out of the room. He lay horizontally, stiff as a board, perhaps to prevent jostling. Harry, who felt that he was committed to seeing this espionage to the end, followed her up to the hospital wing.

She went straight for the light blue curtain that partitioned the room, disappearing behind it. Harry slipped through after her, and saw that this section of the ward was darkened, with shuttered windows and curtained beds. Madam Pomfrey deposited the prone professor on the nearest bed and cast a few more spells to change out his clothes. She placed his robes and boots at the end of the bed, though she left his turban on his head, before leaving. Harry waited until the sound of her footsteps had disappeared completely before he crept closer to Professor Quirrell.

He felt a little foolish, not to mention awkward, just looking at his unconscious professor. Just as he was wondering whether to give up this rather unexciting adventure and go attend to his sorely neglected homework, Professor Quirrell stirred, cracked an eye open, and then sat up straight in bed, looking quite alert for someone who had allegedly been unconscious a second ago. He withdrew his wand, and Harry had an inkling as to what was about to happen the moment before it did. Without thinking, he threw himself to the floor and rolled underneath the hospital bed, just as the professor murmured, " _Homenum revelio_."

Had that worked? Harry figured that the person to be revealed had to be in the circle traced by the wand, so if he was right underneath the professor, it should have missed him. He also hadn't felt the telltale sensation of something feather-light swooping over his head. He held his breath in anticipation, and to prevent inhaling all the dust.

There was a light creak from above as the professor shifted his weight, and Harry saw his bare feet swing over the side. Professor Quirrell walked to the end of the bed, presumably to retrieve his robes, and Harry inched out slowly from his hiding place, clutching the edges of the invisibility cloak securely around him. He didn't think any of the dust had clung to his cloak—it was incredibly slippery and seemed to repel particles. The hems had not got dirty (and therefore visible) despite dragging against the floor the entire time.

By the time Harry managed to right himself, Professor Quirrell had dressed and retrieved what appeared to be a gyroscope with a golden chain from his pocket. He slipped the chain over his head, pinched the apparatus between his fingers, and turned the outside ring several times.

He disappeared.

Harry did a double take at the empty air where he'd formerly been, and looked around wildly, before he came to his senses. Had the professor gone invisible like him?

" _Homenum revelio_ ," Harry tried to mouth without voicing, but he felt nothing, and couldn't be sure if the spell just hadn't worked on account of the lack of actual incantation, or if there was really nobody there.

His uncertainty was put aside when the curtain sectioning off the ward was pushed aside, and Professor Quirrell, completely visible, stalked inside. He stopped by the bed, changed back into the hospital nightgown he had just discarded, and lay down on the bed as if nothing had happened.

Harry leaned over to peer at Professor Quirrell carefully. His breathing was shallow and even, and he appeared to be actually out cold, and not just feigning sleep. Perplexed, Harry padded cautiously over to the professor's robes. Was that gyroscope-like device still in there? He checked a robe pocket and found it thankfully not expanded, but clearly empty. On the other side, he struck gold.

Glancing over again to ensure that Professor Quirrell was still sleep, he quickly withdrew his arm, prize in hand, and pulled it underneath his invisibility cloak. Success.

He examined it more closely. It seemed to be a tiny hourglass, filled with real sand and mounted on two sets of rotating golden rings. The whole thing was smaller than his palm. What was it that Professor Quirrell had done with it? Harry checked another time that he was still out cold, and reached out to pass the chain over his head. Then he held up the apparatus and spun the rings until they jammed and would go no further.

The world spun in a kaleidoscope of colour, though he felt no jostling and heard no whooshing of wind. He had a moment to realise that that had perhaps not been the best of ideas, and then everything was back in order, except he noticed immediately that Professor Quirrell was gone, and his clothes with him. The hospital bed was neatly made up, sheets perfectly pressed and tucked, as if nobody had recently been sleeping there at all.

A little shaken, Harry pulled the chain back up over his head, thankful that it had not adhered to him or had some other unpleasant effect, and tucked the strange object into his pocket. He really had no idea what it had done, besides mysteriously transport Professor Quirrell out of sight.

It was about time he addressed his homework, anyway. He'd spent far too long sneaking about under his cloak like a criminal.

Determined to return to acting like a normal person, he hurried out of the hospital wing and, once he made sure the coast was clear in the hall, stripped the invisibility cloak off and stuffed it back into his pocket.

Just as he made it downstairs, intent on heading to the library for real this time, he saw Professor Quirrell running down the corridor at almost full tilt, the ends of his purple turban streaming behind him.

It was impossible not to follow. Harry warred with himself for about two seconds before he pulled out his invisibility cloak again and wrapped it around himself, giving chase.

There was no need to be stealthy—Professor Quirrell was practically out of sight already, but this was the third floor and there were only so many places he could be going. Harry hurried along, stopping only at the corner to peer around it carefully in case the professor was waiting nearby and was going to cast the human-revealing spell again to be paranoid.

But there was no sign of him. Harry almost thought he had pulled some sort of disappearing act again, when he heard the strangest thing—there was music coming from up ahead, a soothing melody from some kind of stringed instrument. Thoroughly confused, Harry crept along cautiously until he was at the forbidden door. It swung shut just as he had it in view, and the sound of the music cut off abruptly.

Logic suggested that Professor Quirrell had gone inside, and had done something to neutralise the dog. Harry wanted desperately to follow, but he couldn't open the door now, invisible or not. If he did, the light from the corridor would be completely obvious to anybody inside.

Harry whirled around at the sound of footsteps, moving closer to the wall in fear of being detected. Only someone ridiculously paranoid would bother casting the human-revealing charm at every turn, but as it was effectively one of the only weaknesses to his concealment, his mind kept jumping to how to hide from it.

Professor Quirrell, yet again, emerged from the corridor leading to his office at a casual stroll and turned away from the forbidden door, towards the main landing. Harry stared in incomprehension. Were there multiple copies of the man? As absurd as that was, it was the only explanation he could conjure for how he'd just seen him run toward the room with the three-headed dog, before watching him come out of a different location. It wasn't as if one could apparate in Hogwarts, at least, not according to _Hogwarts, a History_.

Was there a spell to make a clone of oneself?

Harry shuddered at his own thought, because yes, there was. The clone was called a horcrux, and it was a horrible thing. Also, as far as he understood it, nobody ever used a horcrux as a literal copy of themselves while they were still alive, so that couldn't be it.

A few minutes later, Professor Quirrell exited from the forbidden door, confirming beyond a doubt that he had been in two places at once. He didn't look excited or nervous, as if he'd just got his hands on a priceless artefact that bestowed eternal life, so Harry figured he was only scouting out the protections.

As he appeared to be returning to his office, Harry followed him to see if he would reveal the password to his rooms, remembering to stop just outside the door so he wouldn't trap himself. He pressed his ear up against the crack.

Harry flinched as he felt a sudden pain in his scar that trumped the usual headache. From inside the office, Professor Quirrell give a muffled whine which tapered off into a high whimper, as if he too were in pain. There was a sort of heavy thump. Had he fallen to the floor?

"I'm s-sor—I'll do better next time," Professor Quirrell said rapidly, his breaths coming in ragged pants. Was he talking to somebody? Harry pressed his ear closer to the wood.

"Master, please, p-please, I—" His words were cut off by a moan that threatened to escalate into a scream. Then it was silent.

That didn't sound too good, Harry thought. Somebody was definitely there with Professor Quirrell—somebody who Harry strongly suspected might be the Dark Lord. He'd been wrong. The Dark Lord couldn't be the professor himself, who was clearly some sort of servant. But was he a relation of the Dark Lord, then? How had he been able to speak Parseltongue?

If only he could see what was going on inside without opening the door.

Wait! He could! His spectacles. Harry could hit himself for failing again to remember that they were magical. It was only that he was just so used to having them sit on his face that he generally quite forgot they were there at all.

Fiddling with the screw on the side, he braced himself for the wild swing in his vision that was about to come next by shutting his eyes. All he saw when he opened them again was an unexciting mixture of dark grey and brown. He tried pulling back a little, and then he could see gigantic black letters on grainy paper—that was the wall—and finally when he withdrew a little more he managed to get a good view of the room, as if he had just stepped through the door.

Professor Quirrell was sprawled out on the floor, out cold. There was no sign of whomever he'd been speaking to. Had they gone into the professor's rooms? Were they invisible, like Harry? The human-revealing spell did not work through doors, so there was no way to tell.

Should he just leave Professor Quirrell like that? Perhaps it was as Madam Pomfrey had said earlier, that he only needed to sleep it off. Still, he didn't know what he would do if it turned out later that the professor had died or something.

Before he could come to any kind of decision, Professor Quirrell stirred on his own, and then stood up as if nothing had happened. He looked perfectly composed and confident as he made for the door. Harry stepped back quickly, reeling a little as his vision returned to normal and showed him only the smooth wood of the door.

A moment later, Professor Quirrell emerged and stalked down the corridor.

Harry relaxed at last, only now discovering how tense he had been. His whole body ached. He rubbed absently at the scar on his forehead, which felt a little inflamed under his fingers. He needed to go do something less stressful, like lie down. Or perhaps finally do his homework.

"Time?" he muttered, looking to his wand tip expectantly, before doing a double take. There was no way it was only near half past noon—it had to be at least half past _three_. Could access spells malfunction? He tried to call for the time again, but persistently received the same feedback.

A little perplexed, he nonetheless began to make his way out of the corridor and towards the common room. There were quite a few people about in the halls, more than he expected during class time, and he couldn't shake the feeling that something was off.

Then he heard Terry's voice coming from the staircase just up ahead, and glanced up automatically to see the most bizarre thing ever—himself. But this wasn't like the case of his face on Nalrod, the reminder of which made him wince. It was literally him, in every way, and he was even talking about Quidditch.

"… because it makes the seeker totally useless," he heard himself say.

"That's the whole point," said Terry. "It showcases how good the rest of the team is."

"Okay, fine. But it seems really uneven. Like why isn't it the other way around? You'd think you would want to spend more of the game with most of the players contributing, and less time with it all riding on one person," Harry, the other Harry, was saying.

Only, Harry remembered saying those things, or at least, their debate about Quidditch, and the role of the seeker in particular, all triggered by the Ravenclaw knocker's difficult question of what made a group of people a team. They'd talked all through the free period and most of lunch, before the imminent potions lesson had forced them to attend to more academic matters.

Well, the time-telling spell had told him quite clearly that it was half past noon, he thought numbly. Perhaps it really was.

Thankfully, he was still shrouded by the invisibility cloak, and so his past self and his friends did not have the utterly traumatising experience of meeting another one of him with no explanation even remotely at hand. Harry, right now, thought he had a pretty good idea of what had caused him to go back in time.

He needed to think. Now that he was aware that there was another one of him (perhaps the proper version of him, for the moment) running about, he knew he had to stay under the cloak to avoid being seen by anybody else. This also explained how there were two of Professor Quirrell. Time machines.

Had Professor Quirrell pretended to faint at that staff meeting in order to buy himself more time? Harry wasn't sure—it had looked pretty realistic. He'd also seen the man faint in the privacy of his own office, before recovering with impressive alacrity. He certainly hadn't done that on purpose, or at least, not on his own purpose. There was the matter of the Dark Lord. Harry hadn't seen anybody, not even with his spectacles that could see through things, but that still didn't mean anything. He was sure the Dark Lord had been in that room. No better explanation was readily available.

Harry supposed he had the entire afternoon effectively off, and necessarily under the invisibility cloak, which was prime for continuing to tail Professor Quirrell. Most likely some version of the man was at lunch, while the other was off doing who-knew-what. Harry decided to go to the Great Hall, figuring he might as well nick some food while he was at it, as he felt rather peckish from all the sneaking around he had been doing.

Professor Quirrell was, indeed, sitting in the Great Hall, and appeared visibly ill. His face was sort of greyish, and his eyes were sunken, like those of an inferius. Harry supposed he'd eschewed his prescribed bed rest to go gallivanting about in the past with his time machine, and that couldn't have been good for his health.

Feeling rather powerful, Harry walked right up to the head table until he was standing practically under Professor Snape's long nose. The man sort of stiffened as he approached, and Harry paused too, a little nervous, but then the moment passed and Snape returned to his peas.

On Professor Quirrell's other side, Professor Flitwick was amicably trying to make conversation, completely oblivious to Professor Quirrell's obvious reluctance to engage.

"You can learn so much from the students," Professor Flitwick was saying. "Why, did you know Ms Tonks is always coming up with new uses for old charms? Recently she's put household spells to duelling. A scouring charm to the mouth isn't just for misbehaving children! I always said there's not one charm that couldn't be an offensive one."

"Quite, quite right," Professor Quirrell agreed after a long pause.

This was boring, Harry quickly realised. Professor Quirrell wasn't doing anything suspicious, besides exhibiting an incredibly anti-social demeanour. Harry slumped against the back of the table and slid down until he was sitting on the cold stone. Of course this was the version of Professor Quirrell that was pretending to be normal, so that the other one could get up to all sorts of illicit activity. Just his luck.

After lunch, Professor Quirrell also did not slip off to complete nefarious plots unknown, but proceeded to go teach the second years. Harry discovered that he was just as unintelligible and uninteresting there as with the first years. Life was sometimes fair, he supposed.

Harry eventually lay down and took a nap, no other good ideas in mind. A whispered softening charm at the back corner of the classroom and he was quite cosy, until the fifth years started duelling practice and Penelope nearly stepped on him. It was a miracle she hadn't paid much attention to her foot dragging on the hem of his cloak. Harry certainly felt it and woke up, and for a heart-stopping moment thought she'd pulled it far enough to break the invisibility and expose him.

He managed to tug it back at the last instant, and scrambled to get out of the way. He had no desire to be hit by a wayward disarming charm. It would be best if he went to sleep elsewhere. No sooner had he had the thought than he was struck in the side by the full body-bind curse. His arms and legs snapped together, and he toppled sideways and hit the wall very painfully. Helplessly, he watched as the edge of the cloak slipped to the side and revealed him for all to see.

At first, nobody noticed, but then the boy who had shot the spell pointed and yelled, "Behind you!"

"I'm not going to fall for that one," said his opponent, " _Stupefy!"_ and the first boy was already so stupefied that he only stood there and let the spell take him out. Surprised, the other student turned around and jumped backwards when he saw Harry lying there at his feet.

"Professor! There's a firstie or something here!" he called. Harry would have scowled if he could—why didn't the boy cast the cancellation charm first? As it was, all he could do was lie there, paralysed.

Professor Quirrell took his time crossing the room, skirting around the students who were still duelling obliviously. Others nearby had stopped to see what was going on. Embarrassingly, Penelope and Robert and a smattering of other Ravenclaws were among them. Finally, Penelope freed him from the curse and he scrambled to his feet, glancing from face to face and finally looking to the floor as he felt his face grow hot.

"What are you doing here?" Penelope whispered, looking torn between scolding him and laughing out loud. Thankfully, she didn't have the opportunity to do either, because Professor Quirrell finally came near, pushing through the huddle of students.

"What's g-going on here?" he asked, before looking down and finally noticing Harry. "Mr P-potter! What are you d-doing here? This is the f-fifth year lesson."

"Er," Harry said, no convenient excuses coming to mind for why he might have been invisibly tailing Professor Quirrell for the better part of the afternoon. Then again, it wasn't clear at all that that was the case. "I, er, wanted to see what kinds of spells they were casting," he said lamely.

"Could've just asked, mate," Robert muttered.

"W-well I suppose it's not tech-technically against the rules to attend other lessons," Professor Quirrell said after a pause. "B-but it's hardly safe to be sk-skulking around in the middle of a duel. F-five p-points from Ravenclaw for endangering yourself and others, and detention with me t-tonight at eight."

Harry winced, not at the points but at the prospect of spending even more time with Professor Quirrell while visible. Well, he'd dug himself into this mess.

"Er all right, I'll just be going now," he muttered awkwardly, and then turned and ran out of the classroom. His head was about to explode with shame. As soon as he was out the door he wrapped his cloak around him, retreating into his invisible cocoon. "Ugh," he muttered to himself.

Could he just erase the last few minutes? He reached into his pocket, rummaging around until he felt something smooth and cold. He tugged at it and found the time machine on its golden chain. Putting it on, he flicked the outer ring, but it appeared to be stuck. Most likely there was a limit to how much it could be used. Well, there went that plan.

Naturally, when he finally returned to the Ravenclaw common room after spending the rest of the afternoon holed up in the library to avoid his past self, everybody had already heard the story.

"Mate," said Terry, standing up as he walked in. "Heard you went in for some extra studying."

"Shut up," said Harry, burying his face in his hands as the others laughed.

"It's pretty hilarious, you've got to admit," said Anthony. "They'll make you the Ravenclaw mascot."

"Go ask Flitwick if you can skip years," Terry suggested. "Four of them, to be exact."

"Were you actually there to learn advanced spells? From _Quirrell_?" Stephen asked.

Harry had some pride left, and he he shook his head vehemently. "No! I was, er, taking a nap in the classroom." Well, that was true, at least.

Everybody looked totally incredulous. "Mate, that makes even less sense," Terry said. "You're mental."

"You've got a bed," Stephen pointed out.

"It's far," said Harry. Terry frowned thoughtfully.

"True, it is a bit far. Why'd you come back here anyway? Heard you got detention."

Harry scowled. "Yeah. I dunno. I finished my homework and I just walked back without thinking." He'd accidentally skipped dinner, to boot, and was starving.

"You finished all your homework already?" Terry demanded. "Look, he's bored, that's what. That's why he's spying on fifth year lessons. If you've got nothing to do, you should join broom racing."

"I haven't got a broom," Harry said. He'd heard, to his disappointment, that it was a requirement for the club.

"Neither have I," said Terry. "You can't go in the competitions but they still let you join practice if you can get Madam Hooch to lend you one of the school ones. Mind you most of us still can't go straight on those, but you obviously haven't got an issue."

Harry nodded thoughtfully. The final flying lesson of the year had seen much rejoicing from just about everybody. People who had various coordination issues, fear of heights, or motion sickness had been glad to see the last of the jerky school brooms. On the other hand, proficient fliers like Harry had been bored out of their minds by the repetitive and easy drills. Broom racing sounded much more exciting.

"Racing is for hooligans," Lisa muttered with a sniff.

"Oi!" Terry yelled. "At least we don't bash anybody's heads in with bludgers like in Quidditch."

"You like Quidditch too," Lisa pointed out.

Harry excused himself from the budding argument, if one could call it that (Lisa was already clearly winning, as usual) with a quick, "I've got to head to detention."

He'd received a notice earlier from Professor Quirrell to meet him in front of the Great Hall and to wear something warm. From that Harry figured they would be going outside, which was new. He'd already forgotten his cloak, at least, the non-invisible one, but he figured a warming charm would do in a pinch.

"G-good evening Mr P-potter," Professor Quirrell greeted as Harry stepped off the stairs. He checked the time discreetly, but it was still five to eight. Professor Quirrell was just very early.

"Evening sir," said Harry, looking him up and down in an attempt to divine what they would be doing. He was dressed normally, with the addition of a heavy cloak, but the extra bulk only increased his deathly pale and haggard appearance. Harry almost asked him if he was feeling better—it really didn't look like it—but then remembered that he wasn't supposed to know about his fainting earlier in the day.

"Since you're here," Professor Quirrell said, "let's go." He pushed one of the great double doors open a crack and slipped through, beckoning for Harry to follow.

A blast of frigid air struck him as he approached, and he shivered uncontrollably as he stepped out.

"You don't have your c-cloak," Professor Quirrell observed.

" _Calesco_ ," Harry said, pointing his wand at himself and making a tight zigzag. A blast of warmth struck him and enveloped him like a cocoon. He'd practically perfected this spell cooking potatoes one at at time over the holiday. Fortunately, warming a person took about as much effort as baking several potatoes, which meant he was hopefully not at risk of cooking himself. That would be a pretty stupid way to die.

"Imp-pressive," said Professor Quirrell.

Harry didn't see what was so impressive about this given that the man had seen him learn multiple curses already, but he accepted the compliment with a muttered, "Er, thanks, sir." His breath came out in a puff of mist that dispersed into the shimmering moonlight. "So what are we doing?"

"We're g-going to be looking for unicorns in the forest," said Professor Quirrell.

"The Forbidden Forest?" Harry said, for clarification. "Isn't that forbidden?"

"Only to unaccompanied students," Professor Quirrell assured him. Harry supposed the professor could probably defend them from any of the wild creatures rumoured to live in there, supposing he didn't pass out again.

"Why are we looking for, er, unicorns?" Harry asked. What a peculiar detention.

"Injured unicorns. Hagrid has informed us that there's something attacking them in the forest," said Professor Quirrell.

Harry tried to think of what might attack a unicorn and came up blank. They didn't have any natural predators, from what he remembered reading.

"Is it a wizard, do you think, sir?" he asked.

Professor Quirrell looked very surprised at this, and took a moment to formulate a response. "M-maybe," he said ambivalently, and turned to begin walking down towards the dark forest. Harry didn't like the look of it. Were they planning on just wandering about inside?

"Sir, is there a plan?" he asked, before trying to suggest something. It was supposed to be his detention after all, not some leisurely excursion.

"We're looking for b-blood. It's silver," said Professor Quirrell. Harry thought it was a pretty stupid plan.

"Can't we—I mean, wouldn't it be safer if we used the patronus charm?" he asked. "It attracts unicorns."

Professor Quirrell paused.

"We don't want to alert the hunter," he said finally. Harry narrowed his eyes. They were hardly being discreet, otherwise. Was Professor Quirrell incapable of casting the patronus charm? He remembered Petri saying that it was a common weakness in other dark wizards.

"We should muffle our footsteps," Harry suggested as they reached the border of the forest, which, even if not forbidden, looked very forbidding.

"How?" asked Professor Quirrell. How unhelpful. Wasn't he supposed to be the fully-trained wizard here?

"I dunno, sir," said Harry, not eager to give away his own technique. "I thought maybe there's a spell for it."

There was also a spell to blend right into ones' surroundings, called disillusionment or something. He vaguely remembered having to sign some papers saying he agreed not to bring any suit against the security company if the shop was robbed by disillusioned thieves, because standard security charms didn't work on them.

He decided not to bring it up, since Professor Quirrell obviously wasn't serious about not being detected, and had even lit his wand. They crunched rather loudly through the undergrowth and their robes got caught easily on thorn bushes every other minute. Harry made liberal use of the severing charm, relying on the night vision provided by his spectacles to see.

Something bright flashing in the corner of his eye gave him pause. He glanced down and saw flecks of viscous liquid beading at the tips of some thorns, like quicksilver.

"Professor, look," he called, pointing out what he was fairly sure was unicorn blood. The last time he'd seen it, it had been blue, but that was when all the magic had been drained out of it.

"Very good," said Professor Quirrell, reaching above Harry's head to tug something off a nearby branch. It was a tangle of fine white hair. "Do you see hoof marks?"

"There," said Harry, looking on the other side of the thicket. The imprints in the ground were dark crescents in his brightened vision.

Now apparently interested in stealth, Professor Quirrell turned and cast a quick " _Silencio!_ " at him. Harry was about to complain that the silencing spell wasn't going to do any good in silencing their bumbling about in the forest, but of course no sound came out of his mouth. What if he needed to cast spells? The hot-air charm he'd used to warm himself was probably going to need renewing soon.

Professor Quirrell was moving very swiftly now, the crackling of his boots in the leaves almost a continuous susurration. Harry crunched along behind him in an attempt to keep up, proving that the silencing spell had done no good whatsoever. How did Professor Quirrell expect not to startle their quarry now?

Well they found the unicorn, anyway, soon enough. It was just lying in another thicket of thorns, bleeding everywhere and apparently unconscious. Harry felt cold looking at it, and couldn't tell if it was coming from inside him, or just his warming charm wearing off.

Professor Quirrell cast some non-verbal spell at it that made a great slash in its throat. Harry felt a sudden stab of pain in his scar, and he flinched for a moment, clutching his forehead.

When he looked back, Professor Quirrell was somehow standing next to him, looking at him in concern. Harry glanced down bemusedly at his hand, which he didn't remember lowering. The unicorn was clearly dead now—there was a small puddle of blood where Professor Quirrell's powerful spell had cut its neck.

"Are you all right?" Professor Quirrell asked him. "I'm sorry you had to see that, but it was kinder to put it out of its misery."

"Mm," Harry croaked out, surprised to hear himself. When had Professor Quirrell lifted the silencing charm? "I'm fine, sir," he said more clearly. What was there not to be fine about? Only, he felt a little disorientated, for some reason, and the feeling persisted as they left the forest.

"We'll need to stop by the gamekeeper," Professor Quirrell told him as they made it to the edge of the dense wood. They continued along the perimeter of the forest until they reached the lonely but sturdy wooden hut, which was surrounded by a tall picket fence that looked like it had been carved right out of the neighbouring trees. The gate was open, and they made their way down a short path up to a stone porch. Harry observed a massive pair of furry boots resting beneath the shuttered window, along with a crossbow that was bigger than he was.

Professor Quirrell ascended to the door and gave it a few quick raps with his knuckles, before backing away hurriedly. Immediately, loud barking could be heard from inside, and there was the scrabbling of claws at the door.

"Back, Fang, back!" said a gruff voice. They heard the clattering of a heavy chain and the snick of a deadbolt, and then the door opened up a crack to reveal a mess of curly hair and one large, beady black eye. A stream of blisteringly hot air puffed visibly outwards, and it suddenly occurred to Harry that he was freezing, and had forgotten to reapply his charm.

"Professor Quirrell," said the gamekeeper over a continuing serenade of barks and growls. Harry saw an excitable shadow moving about somewhere behind the large man's flannel-clad leg. "Ter what do I owe the pleasure?"

"We've just c-come back from the forest," said Professor Quirrell, gesturing for Harry to come into view. The gamekeeper's visible eye widened, and he held up a finger to bid them wait a moment as he turned, reprimanded his presumed dog, and then slipped out the door with surprising alacrity to join them on the front step.

"Hullo. Don't believe we've met properly," said the gamekeeper, reaching out a hand the size of dinner plate. "Hagrid, Keeper o' the Keys."

"Nice to meet you, Mr Hagrid, sir. I'm Harry," said Harry.

"Oh no sirs or misters. Jus' call me Hagrid," said Hagrid. Then he did a sort of double take, and had a bit of a consternated expression on his face, what little of it was visible behind his gigantic beard, as he stared at Harry. Finally, he turned to Professor Quirrell. "Yeh find anything out there, Professor?" he asked.

"We found a unicorn," said Professor Quirrell. "Terribly injured. I had to—I had to…" The professor sort of went pale there, and didn't finish his sentence.

"He had to put it out of its misery," Harry finished for him, wondering what was wrong with the man all of a sudden. Wasn't this the same person who had tried to teach him the enemy's curse, and an assortment of other curses, with the intent that he use them on a sentient being? Or was Professor Quirrell worried that he'd hurt his soul? From what Harry understood of it, the intention behind the killing was what mattered, and he wasn't sure killing a unicorn was even sufficiently "unspeakable" for an adult to matter.

"Oh," said Hagrid a little breathlessly, and Harry was surprised to see a lone tear leaking out the corner of his eye. The man wiped it away quickly on his sleeve. "I'd hoped… but it was the right thing ter do, Professor. Could yeh show me the spot?"

"Of c-course," said Professor Quirrell. "But p-perhaps I should walk Mr P-Potter here back to the castle first."

"O' course!" Hagrid agreed. "I'll be 'ere."

Professor Quirrell led the way back up, and Harry tried to cast the hot-air charm again but found his hands too frozen to execute the proper wand movement. He shoved his whole arm in his pocket and rubbed it against the fabric to warm it up, but only succeeded in making his skin prickle unpleasantly.

"You'd best hurry back to your c-common room," Professor Quirrell suggested. "It's nearly curfew."

"Right. Er, goodbye, sir," Harry muttered, already moving for the stairs. He needed to thaw out, and sleep wouldn't be a bad idea either. He had a bit of a headache, beyond the sort usually triggered by Professor Quirrell's presence.

As it was Friday evening, the common room was packed and the fireplaces were roaring merrily. The first years were still occupying the prime piece of real estate they'd claimed earlier before the upper years had got out of lessons, one of the glass tea tables that was surrounded by cushy armchairs. There weren't quite enough for everybody, but Sue and Mandy seemed content to squish on one seat, while Lisa was draped over its arm and back. Oliver and Michael had elected to sit on the floor at the corner of the table, where Monopoly had once more been set up. Terry was lazily moving his game piece with his wand from a distance.

"Want to join?" asked Anthony as Harry approached. He was off to the side with Stephen, Morag and Padma, playing Exploding Snap.

"Maybe for a few rounds," Harry agreed.

"How was detention?" asked Stephen.

"Weird," said Harry. "We went into the forest—"

"The Forbidden Forest?" Morag demanded. "No way."

"Apparently it's not forbidden if you go with a teacher," Harry said. "Was news to me too."

"Sounds horrible," Morag said, shuddering. "I can't believe they can make you go in there for detention."

"Don't get detention then," Stephen advised.

"I wouldn't," said Morag.

"I wouldn't for such a weird reason," said Anthony.

"Oh, come on," Harry muttered, and then the card he had just picked up exploded in his hand. "Ouch!"

"Snap!" Padma yelled, just as Anthony managed a weak "Ss."

"Bugger," he muttered as she took the cards, and Padma gave a scandalised sniff. Anthony tried to turn over a card, but it promptly exploded on him.

The explosions soon proved to be a little much for Harry's headache, and he begged off after one round and went upstairs.

He remembered to empty his pockets before he put his robes out for laundering. After that time he'd accidentally washed Uncle Vernon's expensive watch, he always checked. Besides, he didn't want to know what would happen if he submerged the time machine. Maybe nothing, or maybe the world would end.

He put the time machine under his bed in his cauldron, where he put all his miscellaneous things. Nobody had ever stolen anything of his, so he figured it was safe.

When he pulled out his remembrall, the smoke immediately flared bright red.

So he'd forgotten something important, and obviously, that something wasn't to check his pockets. What else did he have to do? His homework was done, he swore it was.

The smoke remained stubbornly red. Just in case, Harry went over each subject. Once he'd enumerated them all it was clear that he'd written every essay for this week. It wasn't the homework then. He'd gone to his detention already, and now it was curfew, so he didn't have anywhere he needed to go, this late.

That left something that he'd forgotten to think about, which was the worst kind. His head pounded. Maybe he'd try to think on it more tomorrow. But he couldn't—he wouldn't be able to sleep. The remembrall wouldn't have alerted him to some pointless thought he wouldn't care about, like what he'd eaten for dinner—which was nothing. His grumbling stomach remembered that clearly enough.

Staring at the remembrall did nothing to help, which was odd. If it was something he'd thought of while having it on his person, it ought to at least prompt him a little. Maybe carrying it around all the time was dulling the effect.

He knew he hadn't forgotten anything important by the time he was in the library, because he'd been using his remembrall to help him study. If he hadn't forgotten it then, he didn't see why it would be something relevant now, so it was probably something that had happened between studying and now—so his detention.

Right. It had been exceedingly odd, and some things didn't add up. He reviewed the whole thing in his head, wishing he had a pensieve. Professor Quirrell had inadvertently suggested that he was a serious dark wizard who couldn't cast the patronus charm. Yet he had pretended to be concerned about killing the unicorn. In front of Hagrid, Harry understood—the large man exuded obvious gentleness and sensitivity despite his size. But why when they had been alone in the forest? It wasn't as if Harry didn't know that Professor Quirrell knew how to use curses for their intended purpose.

The smoke in the remembrall pulsed pink, and then flared red again. Harry narrowed his eyes. He'd almost remembered?

His mind flashed to the last time he'd almost remembered something. His fingers came to rest on the tiny, ridged scars at the base of his neck. "Are you all right?" Professor Quirrell had asked him. Had he obliviated him?

But why? And of what? Suddenly paranoid, Harry raced through everything he knew about the man. He was probably a servant of the Dark Lord, whose location was still frustratingly vague. Was the Dark Lord somewhere in Hogwarts, or were they communicating some other way? If Harry still knew that, Professor Quirrell couldn't have found out that he knew. And he still had the professor's time machine, so it wasn't that.

The time machine! Could he go back and follow himself and see what had happened? Excitedly, he retrieved it from the cauldron, grabbed his invisibility cloak again, and tried giving it some turns. It was still stuck. His face fell. Perhaps it was broken, or it had reached its limit. There went that plan.

He dropped his things back in his cauldron and slumped onto his bed with a groan. How did one go about reversing oblivation? He had no idea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Hogwarts schedule is a big nightmare (it's technically possible to have all seven years of lessons without overlap, but that leaves every day jam-packed), and I can't imagine the teachers functioning without time turners. Given that they issued one to Hermione just so she could take some extra classes, it seems unlikely that they would deny them to the teachers anyway.


	31. Experiment

According to the library, there was no known way to reverse the memory charm. If one had the memories stored beforehand, simply viewing them in a pensieve would be just as good as the real thing. Otherwise, if one had a general idea of what had happened the false-memory charm could be used to restore a facsimile of it.

Harry frowned, tossing the latest book aside. They all had to be wrong. He had experienced for himself that it was possible to recover erased memories. Perhaps Silviu had just performed the charm poorly? This seemed unlikely to him. Whatever disparaging things Petri liked to say, Harry was sure that the vampire was good at mind magic, even the kind that needed a wand.

"What are you doing here?" a familiar voice demanded in a loud whisper. Harry twisted around in his chair to see Terry and Anthony approaching, each with an armful of books.

"What do you mean what am I doing here?" Harry shot back. "Library's public." Terry dropped his books on the table with a dull thud and wiped his hands on his robes as if to clean them.

"I thought you finished your homework," he said.

"I did," said Harry with finality. "I'm doing other research."

"On what?" Terry glanced over at the pile of books already scattered haphazardly across the table. "Memory charms? Did someone find out some dark secret of yours?"

"No," said Harry. "I'm looking for how to reverse them. I think someone got me with one."

"Seriously, mate? Did you forget something important?" Terry asked.

"I'm not sure," Harry admitted. "I want to remember, either way."

"I s'pose that makes sense," Terry agreed. "Find anything?"

Harry shook his head. "These all say there's no counter to it, but there's got to be. Everything has a counter."

"The Unforgivables haven't got a counter," Terry pointed out. Harry glanced at him askance. Somebody had clearly been doing some extracurricular reading as well.

"Yeah, and they're unforgivable. The memory charm sure isn't," he said.

"Maybe you can ask Professor Flitwick," Anthony suggested.

"While you're at it, ask him if he can assign shorter essays," Terry added. Anthony swatted him on the shoulder.

"That's not a bad idea," Harry said, regarding the former suggestion.

Professor Flitwick graciously agreed to see Harry after lunch, despite it being Saturday. He walked Harry up to his office, which was still as crammed full of books as ever, and offered him a biscuit from a long tin.

"Er, no thank you, sir," said Harry, as they had just eaten. Professor Flitwick shrugged and took one for himself.

"So what was it you wished to see me for?" he asked.

"I was reading in the library, about the memory charm, and was wondering if there's a counterspell. None of the books mentioned one," Harry said.

"There isn't, which is why the spell is only to be used by licensed professionals," Professor Flitwick said sternly. "Please tell me you haven't been practising it, young man."

"I haven't," Harry reassured him. "But are you completely certain there's no counter? Maybe not a spell, but something else. Would it wear off on its own if it was cast improperly?"

Professor Flitwick shook his head. "The memory charm doesn't hide or somehow artificially prevent you from remembering your memories. It erases them on the spot, so there is nothing to 'wear off.'"

"But," Harry protested, hesitated, and then decided to continue on, "It's just that it's happened to me before. That I was memory charmed but I eventually remembered—had the memory of what happened, that was removed."

Alarm flashed across Professor Flitwick's face, solidifying into wide-eyed concern. "Are you—I don't mean to doubt your story, but are you sure? You weren't just told what happened? A replacement memory might form in that case, and it's not exactly the same."

Harry frowned and tried to think on what had actually happened. He'd sort of remembered in a dream, he thought, and it had been a bit jumbled. But it had cleared up over the next few days, the recollection of the minute in the graveyard where he had screamed at Silviu for killing Nalrod, and the vampire had leaned down and pinned him to a gravestone and called him a foolish child before biting him to prove it.

"I'm not absolutely certain," Harry admitted, "I remembered it in my sleep so maybe it was a dream. Afterwards there was physical evidence so I knew more or less what happened. But I remembered him saying some things that I definitely didn't remember at the time, and I don't know how I would've come up with them."

"Our minds are remarkably capable of filling in details," said Professor Flitwick, though his words sounded too cautious.

"I suppose," said Harry, unconvinced. "But, so, are you completely, totally certain that it's impossible to actually recover memories erased by the memory charm? It's just, for what it's worth, sir, it really does seem to me like I did."

"I..." Professor Flitwick stopped for long enough that Harry was pretty sure he did know something, but didn't want to say it.

"There's a way, isn't there?" Harry said. "Is it a secret? Is that why it isn't in any books?"

This seemed to resolve the professor's indecision, and he gave a sort of jerky shake of his head. "There's no true counter," he said firmly, "but there's a known, let's say, pseudo-counter. In fact, they are mutual pseudo-counters, in that they partially reverse each other's effects."

He was obviously stalling, so Harry said, "What's the other spell?"

"It's entirely illegal. It's called the cruciatus curse. Do you know what that is?"

Harry nodded. "It's a torture curse, one of the Unforgivable Curses," he said.

"So you can see why I, well, why I hoped that you hadn't really recovered that memory of yours," said Professor Flitwick.

"Yes sir, it makes sense now," Harry agreed. Only, it probably made sense in the opposite way of what the Professor was thinking. He _had_ been exposed to the cruciatus curse shortly after the memory charm, which meant that it was entirely possible that he'd recovered his true memory. He chanced one more question. "Sir, but how does that work? I don't see how the two spells could be related."

"Torture, it does strange things to the mind," Professor Flitwick said, sounding rather uncomfortable with the topic. "The cruciatus curse, in particular, affects only the mind, and not the body. Nobody really knows exactly how it works, as it isn't possible to conduct experiments, but there's a theory that the victim of the curse reaches desperately and indiscriminately into the past in order to avoid the present moment, and that that can forcibly recreate the lost connections. I was a bit imprecise earlier, in saying that the memory charm erases memories. What it actually does is erase the connections between memories, which is effectively the same thing, except in this horrible case."

"Oh. Thanks for explaining, Professor," said Harry. "Er, sorry for bothering you with this on the weekend."

"No, it was no trouble at all," said Professor Flitwick, his genial mood returning. "You're always welcome to ask me questions. Was there anything else? How's your structure sight charm coming along?"

"Oh, it's okay," said Harry. He hadn't practised it much after finding out how many light years away he was from actually being able to use it in real life. "I got a bit stuck after three colours."

"That's a common place to run into trouble," said Professor Flitwick. "If you'd like, I can recommend some books with exercises."

"Er, sure. That would be great, sir," said Harry.

Professor Flitwick smiled at him. "If you need some motivation, let's say you won't need to hand in your regular Charms homework if you can show me your progress on each exercise in this book." He scribbled something down on a bit of parchment, and slid it across his desk. "It should be in the library, and there's one exercise for each chapter, so let's say you try to do one a week. Of course, I don't mean to assign you extra work—you're certainly welcome to continue handing in the usual assignments if you'd prefer."

"No, I mean, I'd love to do these other exercises instead. Thank you, sir," Harry said quickly, more pleased than ever that he had caved and shown Professor Flitwick his mastery over the entire first year Charms curriculum after the previous week's practical, where the professor had jokingly asked him if there was a spell he didn't know.

"I talked to Professor Flitwick and he cancelled my homework," Harry told Terry later, rather smugly.

"You're having me on," said Terry. "Wait, I thought you already finished it anyway."

"For the rest of term," Harry clarified. "I'm totally serious."

"No way," said Terry, shaking his head. He was grinning, but when Harry tried his best to present a stoic mien, his face fell into a frown instead. "Really? How?"

"Well, he gave me some other stuff to work on instead," Harry admitted. "I already know the first year charms."

Terry groaned and clapped his hand to his face. "You got my hopes up for nothing. I definitely don't know all those spells, and I definitely wouldn't want _more_ work even if I did. You're mental, you know."

"Thanks," said Harry. "I do know."

Terry was the one who couldn't know how right he was. For a good, solid moment after learning from Professor Flitwick that the cruciatus curse could reverse memory charms, Harry had seriously considered asking Petri to torture him over the Easter holiday. _That_ was actually proof that he was going bonkers, and was also some kind of imbecile.

After all, he didn't need to recover the actual, exact memory that Professor Quirrell had removed. Who cared about that? He just needed to know what had happened that night, or rather, whatever it was that he had seen, that Professor Quirrell would rather he hadn't seen. Had the Dark Lord appeared, perhaps? Had Professor Quirrell done something to Harry?

The old thought came back to him that Professor Quirrell had been cursing him somehow this whole time, first with the Evil Eye and now that that wasn't an option, more directly.

The thing that was missing from all this, still, was the motive. Just what did the professor, or more likely the Dark Lord, want from him? If it was information on how he had survived the killing curse, Harry couldn't see how tutoring him in random curses was useful at all. And if the Dark Lord still wanted him dead, surely he really would be dead by now? Petri had implied that he himself, an adult dark wizard with some modest skill, would probably be so outmatched in a duel against someone like the Dark Lord that he might as well off himself if he couldn't escape. Harry didn't like the sound of those odds.

What if, he thought suddenly, he just asked? He was tired of tailing Professor Quirrell around under the invisibility cloak while he did nothing interesting whatsoever, and getting caught a second time would just be too much. The Dark Lord obviously knew that Dumbledore knew that he was in the castle and was currently doing nothing about it, and Dumbledore probably knew that he knew—at this point, Harry squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed at his temple—he wasn't sure that there was any advantage to his continuing to pretend that Professor Quirrell was duping him with his flimsy excuses.

On the other hand, he could be missing something vital, literally. What if his asking somehow prompted the Dark Lord to immediately murder him? That didn't make any sense, but worst case scenarios had to be considered seriously when dealing with an actual, confirmed murderer. If only there were a way for him do some sort of hypothetical experiment, to see if he would end up alive and well after the confrontation or not.

Wait. He had a time machine.

This was perfect. It was probably what Professor Quirrell himself had been doing with the time machine in the first place. He would wait where he intended to be in the future, and watch for whether he showed up. If he didn't, that meant something terrible had happened to him, so he just wouldn't go back in time. But if he did see himself, then it was a sign to go ahead.

Harry conducted a dry run of this experiment Sunday afternoon, where he decided while practising the structure sight that he would come under the invisibility cloak and tap himself on the shoulder at precisely three, after going back in time and jumping off the fourth floor landing in the main heptagon, while the moving stair was elsewhere. He'd always wondered if it was really safe for there to be no handrail or anything.

"Do you need to be somewhere soon?" Hannah asked him, after he paused in his practise to check the time for the third time in as many minutes. It was already five minutes past three, but maybe he was running late.

"Er, no," said Harry. "I'm just bored."

"Stop studying then," Hannah suggested.

Beside her, Neville sighed deeply, muttering, "I wish."

"I'm not really studying anyway," Harry admitted. He was just sitting with the structure sight spell applied, staring at the blobs of yellow and pale blue that swirled about lazily in a silvery soup. Hannah and Neville were reliably distinguishable to him, but it was anybody's guess what everything else was. He wondered if he could use this spell to see the invisibility cloak, which had to be highly magical. If so, it clearly wasn't anywhere else right now besides in his pocket.

Ten more minutes passed, and Harry had to accept that he apparently would not be going back in time. But now he realised that he still did not know whether it was safe to fall four floors after all. He hadn't gone back in time at all because he hadn't seen himself, but of course he hadn't seen himself because he hadn't gone back in time!

He groaned and buried his face in his hands.

"Seriously, take a break," said Hannah. "I need one too. Do you two want to go sit by the lake? It looks nice out."

"Yeah, sure," said Harry, cancelling his spell and glancing out the window. It seemed to be a cloudless day.

"I need to finish my Potions essay," said Neville, but he put his things away and joined them anyway.

Spring was beginning to make itself known in the vibrant green of new grass and the pale, delicate buds of nascent wildflowers. It was still quite chilly outside, even with the sun shining overhead, and as they had all neglected to grab their cloaks, Harry cycled a stream of hot air among them to keep warm.

"What's that charm you're using? Warming charm?" Hannah asked.

"Yeah," said Harry. "It heats up the air and lets you move it around. I learned it for cooking but its also useful for warming or drying things."

"You cook?" asked Hannah, looking surprised.

Harry shrugged. "I'm trying to learn," he said. "My uncle doesn't really believe in food, and we drink nutritive potions all the time. It's awful."

"You mean, you drink potions instead of eating?" said Hannah, aghast.

Harry nodded glumly.

"I didn't even know that was possible," she said. "I can't even imagine… I mean, my mum's not the best cook, but at least we have food. But wait, you learned this charm for cooking? You don't need magic to cook, you know?"

"You need magic to cook if you haven't got a stove or an oven," Harry said. "That's the tricky part."

"You don't have a stove?" Hannah demanded, incredulous. "Wait, are there magic microwaves?"

Microwave—there was a word Harry hadn't heard in awhile. Aunt Petunia didn't believe in frozen, ready-made meals, so although the Dursleys had owned a microwave for the sake of having one like everybody else, it had rarely seen use.

"What's a microwave?" asked Neville, and they had to explain. He still looked quite bewildered as to their point, even afterwards.

"This warming charm works about the same," Harry told Hannah.

"But what if you can't cast the charm?" Hannah asked. Harry shrugged.

"I supposed someone could enchant a box to do the charm," Harry said, "but it might be hard to have it have all sorts of options."

"What options?" said Hannah. "It just needs to be at one heat, and you put it in for however long it takes. You know, like a regular microwave. You, er, you _have_ used one?"

"Once or twice," said Harry.

"I forgot you live somewhere wizarding," said Hannah. "My mum's a muggleborn and we live in her old house. It's all muggle there."

"I lived with muggles before," said Harry. "My aunt and uncle. Different uncle."

Hannah nodded. "Well, I think it would be pretty neat to have a magic microwave. Then you could save some food as a snack and warm it up later."

"You could just keep it warm, though," said Harry. "There's a charm for that."

"I thought warm food goes bad quickly," Hannah protested.

"The charm sort of freezes things—well not literally freeze, like cold, but keeps them preserved. It's used for ingredients usually, like for cooking or potions, but I don't see why you couldn't use it on ready food," Harry said. He wondered if it would be a viable strategy to learn the stasis charm and fill up a bag with enough Hogwarts-made food to last a whole holiday. That could actually work.

At this point they finally reached the shore of the lake, where the grass tapered off into gravel and formed a rather unpleasantly grey little beach. Hannah dragged her trainers through the rocks in an effort to smooth them out a bit before she sank to the ground cross-legged. Harry and Neville copied her.

"That charm sounds useful," Hannah said. "Should we put it on the suggestions for next week?"

"Sure," said Harry. "I can't actually do it yet. It's called the stasis charm."

"I'll put it on there," she said. "Vote for it."

"Okay," Harry agreed, though he figured he'd go ahead and vote for whatever caught his interest anyhow.

"Did you read that book?" Neville asked Harry. "The one with the horticulture charms. I mean, it's okay if you didn't. We've had lots of homework."

"Some of it," said Harry. He hadn't really had time to try out any of the charms, however, as they required seeds and he had enough spells to practise already.

"Gran showed me the growing charm over the holiday," Neville said, smiling broadly. "It's a year two spell but it's not all that hard. I was wondering, I mean, if you're interested, we could ask Professor Sprout if we can practise in the greenhouses after lessons."

"Sure," said Harry, surprised at the vague discontent that stirred in his chest at the thought of Neville mastering a charm before him. He pushed it to the back of his mind. The charm sounded useful, so he would learn it.

"What's it for?" asked Hannah. "Growing stuff, obviously, but I mean more specifically."

"Well, it just makes things bigger, really," said Neville. "But when you cast it on plants you can make them actually mature."

"Only plants?" Hannah pressed. "What about animals? People?"

Neville slumped a little. "Er, I don't know. I don't think so. That would be bad, wouldn't it?"

"It's probably one of those things that would need an impossible amount of will to do," Harry guessed, "so you can't actually do it in real life, even if it should theoretically work."

"Makes sense," said Neville.

Hannah nodded, and then turned away to look out over the lake. Neville seemed content to follow her example. Harry considered his failed time travel experiment. It wasn't too late—he could still go back in time and tap himself on the shoulder. But what would happen if he did? Would that then inspire him to instead go back in time and jump off the fourth floor landing, and get himself seriously injured or killed, resulting in no shoulder tap occurring?

This sort of thinking had to be unhealthy. Maybe he ought not to do potentially life-threatening experiments when somebody else might have already done them. Was there perhaps a book on time travel in the library? He could hit himself for not having thought to check before doing something foolhardy.

"Look!" Hannah called out suddenly, pointing somewhere towards the middle of the lake. Harry looked, but didn't see anything.

"What?"

"Up there!"

Harry tilted his head up and saw the unmistakable figure of somebody on a broomstick corkscrewing through the air. They suddenly dipped down and skimmed across the surface of the lake, before regaining altitude and swerving away towards the opposite shore.

"Quidditch practice?" Harry wondered. But the Quidditch field was on their side of the lake.

"Racing, I expect," said Hannah.

Indeed, as they looked on, several more people on brooms flew into view and followed the first flier's trajectory. One of the racers bumped into another and threw them off, sending them tumbling into the water.

"Er, do you think they're okay?" said Hannah, standing up and approaching the edge of the lake uncertainly. Neville said nothing, and had gone pale.

A moment later, a smooth, white _something_ surfaced, carrying a speck of black that was clearly the fallen racer. It rose higher and higher, and revealed itself to be an enormous tentacle.

"It's the giant squid!" Hannah exclaimed. "How cute!"

Harry glanced at her sceptically, but she wasn't even looking in his direction. He turned back to the lake and saw with some alarm that the tentacle was coming towards them, quickly and inexorably growing larger and larger.

Finally the gigantic appendage flopped onto land, and Harry scrambled backwards a little to avoid being splashed. The tentacle wiggled slightly, and rolled a very sodden student onto the gravel shore before withdrawing with a loud plop of displaced water.

The beached student groaned in a familiar way, and then rolled over. It was Terry.

They hurried to his side.

"Terry, are you all right?" Harry asked, pulling out his wand and blasting him with the hot-air charm.

"Mmph," said Terry, squeezing his eyes shut. "Thanks," he said, when the charm ended, leaving him windswept but dry. "Oh, hey, it's you. Ugh, that's embarrassing. Pretend you didn't see that."

"See what?" Harry asked.

"Exactly," said Terry, pushing himself slowly to his feet, and Harry belatedly realised that he was talking about the broom accident.

"Are you hurt?" Harry asked. He'd fallen into the water, but from that height it might not have been much better than land.

Terry bent his arms experimentally and winced. "A little banged up," he said, "but I don't think anything's broken."

" _Episkey_ ," Harry said, trying to clear up any bruising.

"Oh, that feels good. What's that?"

"Healing charm," said Harry. Wasn't that obvious?

"Thanks. Glad you're such a bookworm, mate." Terry turned and looked into the distance above the lake, squinting a bit. After a few moments, he turned back and asked, "Say, did any of you see what happened to my broom?"

Harry glanced to Hannah and Neville, who both shook their heads. He shrugged. "Sorry mate. We were more focused on the part where you fell onto the giant squid."

" _That's_ what that was?" said Terry. "That's actually pretty wicked. Minus the falling part. Ugh. I need to find that broom. It's a school one and Madam Hooch is going to kill me if I lost it. Or worse, broke it."

"Maybe you can borrow another one to go look for it," Harry suggested.

"Fat chance of that," Terry said immediately, shaking his head. Then he glanced thoughtfully to Harry. "But maybe you could. Madam Hooch loves you."

"Er, I wouldn't go that far," said Harry.

"She'll let you though," said Terry with certainty, and Harry had to agree.

"Count me out," said Hannah. "I hate flying."

"You're not half bad at it, though," said Harry.

"I still hate it," she said firmly.

"I still need to do my Potions essay," Neville mumbled, looking down and fiddling with his hands. Flying and Potions regularly competed for the bottom spot on his list of preferred subjects.

"Come on," said Terry, tugging at Harry's sleeve, and he reluctantly left his other friends by the shore.

"Do you think it's gone in the lake?" Harry asked.

"Nah," said Terry. "Probably flew off somewhere."

"How are we supposed to find it then?"

Terry shrugged. "I'm thinking if we go up high we'll be able to see over the grounds and try to spot it that way."

This sounded to Harry like looking for a needle in a haystack, but he supposed he didn't have anything better to be doing anyway. If only he could cast the summoning charm properly, maybe they could use that.

"Wait, what about your mates in the broom racing club?" he asked Terry. "Can't one of them just summon it? They're mostly older years, right? Also, should you let them know you're okay?"

"Ugh, I don't want to show my face back there on foot," said Terry.

"Didn't you get pushed off your broom?" Harry asked. "It's not like you just fell out of nowhere."

"Still a rookie mistake," said Terry.

"You _are_ still a rookie," Harry pointed out, receiving a deep sigh in return. "Is it really that serious? I thought it was just for fun."

"It is fun," Terry protested, "it's just—the racers are a bit of a tough crowd, and I want to compete for real next year, so I really need to work on, well, everything."

Harry frowned. That still didn't seem like cause to not ask for help when it was needed. If anything, it ought to be the opposite. He wasn't sure if he liked the sound of broom racing club so much now.

"You should join," said Terry, oblivious to his misgivings. "You wouldn't have any problems. I bet you'd get picked for a team right away."

"Are there house teams, like Quidditch?" Harry asked. While Quidditch was a sport beloved by the whole school, with game days chock full of hyped up house rivalry and packed stands, broom racing was rather unpopular as a spectator sport and Harry had never even heard of anybody going to watch, much less gone to see it himself.

"Nah, not enough people," said Terry. "There's two teams, Dragon and Phoenix, but they're not fixed. Though usually Dragon's mostly Slytherins and Phoenix is everybody else. But Belby, you know him? He's with Dragon."

"I think I've seen him before," Harry said lamely. The name rang a bell—it must be an older Ravenclaw.

"He's a second year, but he's even smaller than you," said Terry. "Fast little blighter. Dragon's the better team, I think. The Slytherins are all really good and Flint, you know, their Quidditch captain, basically uses the racing team as his reserve. He races too. I think he spends all day flying—don't know how he has time to do homework."

"I never see Slytherins do homework," Harry complained. "Ever." It was a miracle that Vince and Goyle seemed to be getting passing marks, considering he was pretty sure neither of them could read or write, and Vince spent all his time eating, "reading" comics, and playing games, with occasional extracurricular Charms practice in between. They had to be cheating somehow, but Vince always deflected whenever he attempted to ask.

Terry laughed. "Too right, mate. Okay, you go ask Madam Hooch to borrow a broom, and I'll wait here."

They had arrived at the broom shed by the Quidditch pitch, which was currently in use by the Hufflepuff team. Madam Hooch was on the field, eyes trained on the practice overhead.

"She looks a bit busy," Harry said.

"Just go. It'll be fine," said Terry. His confidence did nothing to bolster Harry's, but he ventured off onto the pitch anyway.

Madam Hooch's hawk eyes immediately zeroed in on him as he approached, and she walked up briskly to meet him.

"Mr Potter! I'm afraid only Hufflepuffs are allowed on the pitch at the moment," she told him sternly.

"Er, of course, Madam Hooch. I was just hoping to borrow a broom to er, join broom racing practice."

Madam Hooch glanced back up to the Hufflepuff team, seemed to decide that they were doing fine for themselves, and gave him a curt nod. "All right. Come along."

She led him back behind the broom shed, where Terry was now nowhere to be seen, and opened the heavy padlock with a tap of her wand. The doors swung open, stirring up a cloud of dust, and she ushered him inside.

Harry reached out his hand and trailed it through the air some foot away from the bristles of the brooms, which were laid out on either side of the shed on racks. He felt a sort of nervous energy ghosting over his fingertips as they came near each broom, but none felt right until… there. That was the one he had usually used in flying lessons.

He removed the broom carefully from the rack and shouldered it before walking out.

"Sign your name here," said Madam Hooch, handing him a rather ratty roll of parchment and a quill. It was lined and full of names of previous borrowers. Harry signed on the next blank line and put the date and time. "Make sure to bring it back before six," Madam Hooch told him.

"I will. Thanks, ma'am," Harry said, smiling. She gave him a small smile in return, and then shooed him out of the shed and returned to the Quidditch pitch after locking up again.

"Nice, you got it!" said Terry from behind him, and Harry jumped a foot into the air.

"Where'd you come from?" he demanded.

Terry grinned. "I was just around the corner so she wouldn't see me. Let's go."

"Are we going to walk over there?" Harry asked, glancing sceptically over to the lake. It was a non-trivial distance to the other side.

"Walk? Mate, we have a broom," Terry said.

"One broom," said Harry.

"Two people fit on one broom," said Terry. "I'll sit in back and you steer."

"Er, are you sure?" Harry thought that the broom handle seemed rather thin for two. Then again, there was no reason why a bloody broomstick ought to be able to fly with even one person, either. It was all magic.

"Positive," said Terry. "I fly my little brother around all the time at home."

Harry mounted the broom and then stood there uncertainly, resisting the automatic pull to take off, as Terry put one leg over the shaft behind him and then put his hands on Harry's shoulders.

"Ready when you are," said Terry.

Harry kicked off and shot into the sky, noticing no extra load from his passenger until he tried to accelerate to his usual top speed and found it beginning to vibrate a little earlier than he was used to.

"Merlin's balls! Too fast!" Terry yelled in his ear, and Harry obligingly slowed down, afraid of dropping his friend for a second dip in the lake. The broom stabilised, and they coasted comfortably several meters above the dark water.

When they had made it to the middle of the lake, Terry called for him to stop.

"See my broom anywhere around here?" he asked. Harry pulled up to a hover and pushed up his glasses, looking all around.

"Nothing," he said.

"Me neither," said Terry. "Go higher. Maybe it drifted up."

They flew up, higher than the trees in the Forbidden Forest, and surveyed the grounds again. He could see the whole lake, but there was no sign of any lone broomstick floating about. Near the edge of the forest, Harry spotted the broom racing club, with about a dozen fliers doing laps through an obstacle course with flaming hoops.

"You sure they didn't just bring your broom down?" Harry asked.

"Maybe," said Terry. "But I want to make sure it's not anywhere else first."

This seemed like very backwards logic to Harry, but he declined to comment, since it was clearly a matter of pride for the other boy. Instead, he continued to scan the tree line.

A flash of movement at the edge of his vision caught his attention—somebody, it looked like, had just gone into the forest. He grasped the broom handle firmly and tapped the screw at the edge of his glasses. His vision zoomed in, darting down through the gloom cast by the thick wood and homing in on his quarry. Dappled sunlight skimmed over the sprinting figure and illuminated a flash of purple—Professor Quirrell's turban!

The charms on his spectacles wouldn't go any further, and he reset his view and rubbed at his temples in an effort to soothe his eye strain. He couldn't follow the man now, but perhaps he could do one better and go earlier. After all, he had a time machine.

"Look, there!" Terry said suddenly, and Harry followed his gaze over to the part of the forest close to Hagrid's hut. At first, he didn't see anything out of place, but then there was a brief flicker of movement and he spotted that, sure enough, a riderless broomstick was hovering just level with the top of the trees.

"I see it," he said, and tugged at their broom to speed across the rest of the lake.

"Down!" Terry shouted as soon as they hit the ground, hand outstretched, and his wayward broom meandered lethargically over to him. "Down," he said more firmly, and it sped up a little to zoom the rest of the way into his hand.

"Glad we found it," said Harry, who was a little amazed at their success. Terry grinned at him.

"Thanks so much, mate. There's still nearly an hour of practice left. Want to come?"

"Er, sure," said Harry, thinking it would be awkward now to decline. What was the harm in seeing the club for himself? "Race you there?" he suggested.

"You're on," said Terry, and swung himself onto his broom. "Ready, set, go!"

Harry kicked off a bit late, but he pressed himself as closely to the broom as he could and caught up to Terry in moments. Ignoring the angry vibration of the handle, he urged it forwards ever quicker, angling it towards the fiery obstacle course that lit up the shore. Feeling adventurous, he dove straight down into it, passing through a triplet of rings and narrowly skimming underneath another flier coming from the opposite direction. He tugged up to clear a vertical wall of flames and ducked below a gigantic fiery X, before he found himself zooming through a small crowd of students, many of whom hurriedly dove out of the way despite the fact that he was well above their heads.

His broomstick was careening towards the ground, so he tugged up and leapt off at the last moment, managing to land on his feet. Jarring pain ran up his legs and struck his knees like a hammer, but he remained upright. His broom, now riderless, slowed and floated back down to the ground beside him.

"Bloody buggering hell Boot, watch where you're going!" yelled a tall, heavily-built boy in Slytherin Quidditch robes. Harry thought he might be Marcus Flint. "Wait, you're not Boot. Who the hell are you?"

Terry chose that moment to arrive, though somewhat more placidly, as he'd gone over the obstacles and descended in a spiral rather than a dive.

"Boot, there you are you little bugger. Finally. And who the hell is this?" Flint demanded, pointing to Harry.

"This is Harry," said Terry. "He wants to join racing."

Harry wanted no such thing, but before he could say so, Flint turned to him and said, "That one of those rubbish school brooms?"

"Yeah, as a matter of fact it is. Is that a problem?" Harry shot back, perhaps unreasonably annoyed by the older boy.

"Race me," said Flint in lieu of answering, and vaulted onto his sleek Cleansweep Seven, taking off without so much as naming a destination. Harry scrambled to follow, but found himself tailing Flint even at what felt like maximum speed. Determined not to be totally shown up, he urged his now violently trembling broomstick to go just a bit faster, sticking right behind Flint's bristles and refusing to let up an inch.

Then, as if taunting him, Flint accelerated even more, stretching the distance between them alarmingly. Gritting his teeth, Harry angled his broom down and dove, hoping to make up what his broom lacked using the raw force of gravity. At this speed, he could hardly see past the wind buffeting his face, and only the broom's protective charms kept him from being blown off his seat.

With the ground fast approaching, he corkscrewed rather than pull up, taking advantage of his moment upside down to look for any sign of Flint. The older boy was keeping pace with him higher up, and hadn't managed to make it too far ahead.

As they reached the bend in the lake Flint suddenly slowed to turn. Harry swore as he shot past, trying to use his momentum to gain altitude instead of distance in the wrong direction. He looped upside down and dove again, homing in on the other boy's position. Then Flint descended as well, going lower and lower, and Harry realised he was about to land.

Harry repeated his earlier stunt, dropping aggressively head-on towards the ground and only pulling up to leap off at the last minute. This time, he was better-prepared for the impact and bent his knees enough to absorb the blow. Flint alighted beside him.

"Not bad for a firstie," he said, shouldering his broom. "Shame you're not in Slytherin or I'd snap you up for Quidditch. Ravenclaw team this year's that good, eh? Didn't need you?"

"It's pretty good," Harry agreed. Ravenclaw had beaten both Hufflepuff and Gryffindor, the latter by an astonishing margin of two hundred twenty points. If they won against Slytherin later this term, they were practically guaranteed the Quidditch Cup.

"We'll see," Flint muttered. "Well, if this is what you're like on that utterly shite broom, you're welcome to race for Dragon team as soon as you get a decent one. So that'd be next year since racing doesn't get you firsties a special exception on the broom ban. In the meantime, we practice every Sunday from two to five. It's optional," Flint said this word like it was a foul curse, "but if you don't want to be a loser I suggest you show up."

They flew back around the lake to join the rest of the club. Flint declared that Harry was "decent," and handed him off to the actual club leader, another Slytherin named Emilia Wilkes. She was as tall as Flint and almost as broad, and her short blond hair had been moulded into a crest of spikes.

Despite the impromptu tryout Harry had been subjected to, Wilkes informed him that actually, anybody could join the club and attend practices as they liked. Skill was only necessary if one wanted to join a team, though the teams themselves were loosely defined.

"Racing's a one-on-one sort of thing," said Wilkes. "so we have a champion at the end of every year, but also we have the teams for relay racing and such, and you can boost your score by joining in. The champion gets to hold on to this for a year."

Wilkes tugged at a chain around her neck and pulled up a silver pendant in the shape of a broomstick. "Lifetime pass to any league Quidditch game." She grinned widely and dropped the chain. "I'll be sad to give this up when I leave school."

After giving him a quick run-down of practice, which mostly consisted of running drills through various obstacle courses in shifts, Wilkes left Harry to make acquaintance with the other club members.

He found some familiar faces. Vicky Frobisher was there, as well Tonks. They were both part of the Phoenix team.

"Wotcher Harry," said Tonks. "Didn't know you could fly like that! I bet Flint's tried to recruit you for Dragon—well you should join Phoenix. It's way better."

"How does that work, anyway, if you can just choose a team?" Harry asked.

"Only six people per team fly for relays," Tonks explained. "So really it doesn't matter if you aren't in the top six, and if you're on the edge of course you're gonna join whatever team you can make it onto. But Phoenix is still better." She stuck out her tongue at Flint's back.

When Tonks went to fly with the next group, Terry pulled him aside. "You know Tonks?" he asked, almost in awe. Harry shrugged.

"She's in charms club too," he explained.

"She's really good," said Terry. "Probably the best in Phoenix team. She was runner up last year after Wilkes."

Harry nodded absently, looking around for anybody else he knew. "Are we the only first years?" he asked.

"There are some others but they aren't here today," said Terry. "Half the Slytherins, technically, but they hardly ever show up. A couple 'Puffs."

Finally, Wilkes ushered them over to enter the obstacle course. Going at it in the right direction was rather easier than when he'd haphazardly careened through it earlier. It was a vertical circuit, starting out low and then rising high up for the return journey. The "obstacles" had been drawn with what Harry recognised as the flame drawing charm _flagrate,_ so as to be suitably obvious but also mostly harmless to fly through.

Some people left after a few rounds through the obstacle course, and Harry decided to go as well after his second go around. The course was fun, but it was nearly five, and he had things to do in the past. He wasn't sure how far back the time machine could go and didn't want to miss Quirrell on account of spending too long flying around in a circle.

Waving goodbye to Terry, Harry flew off towards the Quidditch pitch to return his broom. Halfway there, he thought better of it—following Professor Quirrell through the forest might be easier from above—and he changed course for the Forbidden Forest.

He landed just short of the perimeter and glanced around and up to see if anyone might be watching. Nobody was in sight, and the blinds on Hagrid's windows seemed to be down. Reaching deep into his pocket, he felt for the silky material of his invisibility cloak and tugged the garment out, wrapping it securely around himself and draping the remainder over his broom. Then he searched his other pocket for the time machine and pulled the chain over his head.

Holding his breath, he gave the outer ring an experimental turn. It moved easily, and his surroundings blurred. When they grew still again, he drew his wand and checked the time. Four o'clock. So one turn equalled one hour. Well, that was easy enough.

He glanced up, searching for himself and Terry at the shore or above the lake. They had to be coming around any moment now. And there! They'd just taken off, a small black blur over the water. He had to be on alert for Professor Quirrell. Perhaps now was the time to take to the sky.

Would the cloak hide him properly while in the air? The broom fit underneath it, certainly, but it seemed like he might have to fly vertically to get it to stay there while in motion. He clutched the broom close to his chest and kicked off, quickly clamping his legs around the shaft. Thankfully, the charms that made a buffer of air between the rider and the broom adapted well enough to give him a seat to balance on.

Hovering among the branches of a large oak, he considered whether there was anything to be done about the gap in the cloak underneath him. As long as he didn't fly directly above Professor Quirrell, he thought, he should be fine.

When Terry and his past self flew up high, Harry ascended as well and started looking around for Professor Quirrell's approach. There was no sign of him anywhere on the path to the castle, which couldn't be right. Harry pivoted slightly and nearly jumped out of seat when the turbaned man appeared from behind Hagrid's hut, slinking through the shadows at the forest's edge.

He couldn't fly very quickly at all at this angle, but was more than fast enough to follow Professor Quirrell's rustling steps through the forest. Harry doubted it was safe to go any faster anyway, given all the ducking and weaving he had to do to avoid being caught in a tree.

Professor Quirrell seemed to be looking for something very specific. Every once in a while he would stop by a bush and examine it, before moving on. It was always the same sort of bush, Harry noticed, leafless and thorny. Sometimes, there was blood or even a dead animal caught on the thorns. Whenever he encountered something like that, Professor Quirrell would vanish it.

Harry was about to give up—perhaps Professor Quirrell was just doing some esoteric gardening—when the next bush yielded something familiar. Unicorn blood.

Professor Quirrell glanced around nervously, and Harry checked to make sure the hem of his cloak was past the last bristles of the broom. It was.

Like they had done during Harry's detention, Professor Quirrell searched for a blood trail and began to follow it. Harry followed him in turn.

Soon enough, they found the unicorn, practically impaled on one of the those same bushes, only whose thorns had grown to the length of swords where they pierced the animal's body. Professor Quirrell cast a body-bind on the unicorn, and then a spell that made the thorns retract, before he knelt down and leaned in close.

Harry gaped as the man pressed his lips to one of the wounds and began, unmistakably, to drink the silvery blood.

Well then. Obviously, that had to be what he hadn't wanted Harry to remember that night, during the detention. He hadn't just killed the unicorn, he'd drunk its blood. Its cursed blood. Why?

Professor Quirrell was sick, Harry recalled, with something that Madam Pomfrey had apparently never seen before. Unicorn blood was supposed to be some sort of restorative, so he was probably drinking it to keep himself alive.

Harry felt a little ill watching the man, whose face betrayed horrible anguish as he haltingly continued to drink, opening up new wounds when the old ones ran dry. His lips were smeared with silvery-blue blood, his eyes clenched shut as if to avoid seeing what he was doing. He seemed to be having serious trouble swallowing each mouthful, but swallow he did, again and again.

Well, it couldn't taste good, Harry thought. The smell of copper and something like ozone was thick in the air, almost oppressively so.

There really wasn't any reason to stick around. He'd seen what he had come to see. This was Professor Quirrell's secret, or one of them.

Later that evening Harry paced up and down the magical creatures section of the library, conflicted. Should he tell somebody about Professor Quirrell? What he was doing was definitely illegal. That was clear from any book where unicorn blood was mentioned.

 _Why_ it was illegal, or even bad, Harry could find no explanation for. Everywhere it only said that fresh unicorn blood could keep anybody alive for up to a few weeks, no matter how ill or wounded, but the price was too grave to be paid. The drinker would only be half-saved, live only a half-life ever after. He would be cursed even in death. But nowhere did anybody explain what the curse actually did, and how it could possibly be worse than dying.

He glanced through the gap between the aisles toward the rope that cordoned off the restricted section. If there was any more detailed information, it would be in there, he reckoned.

Donning his invisibility cloak, Harry waited for Madam Pince to leave her desk before waltzing right past the dividing rope. He paused there with bated breath, but no alarm sounded, so he continued on.

The books here, unfortunately, mostly did not have their titles on the spines, which made it difficult to tell what topic section he was even in. If he could do the summoning charm… he resolved to practise that charm properly as soon as he could.

Instead, he picked a random book off the shelf and opened it. This proved to be a very bad idea.

It began screaming immediately, and closing and replacing it did nothing to help. Withdrawing his hands to ensure his invisibility, he turned and sprinted for the main library, vaulting over the dividing rope just as an incensed Madam Pince came running past, wand in hand.

" _Silencio!_ " she muttered, and the screaming stopped. That would be a useful spell to know too, and it was frustrating that Petri had suggested it was beyond his level. "Who's there? This is the restricted section! Come out here at once!"

Harry hurried to make himself scarce as Madam Pince began scouring the aisles for the offender.

There went his hopes of free access to the restricted section. At the very least he would have to figure out how to counter whatever alarm spell was on the books.

That still left the matter of understanding what unicorn blood really did. He supposed he ought to owl Petri about it and forget the matter for now. He headed up to the owlry, still invisible.

"Dear Uncle Jochen, why is it bad to drink unicorn blood? What exactly does it do? I saw _somebody_ drinking it. Should I tell anybody?"

To his surprise, his scribbled note got a response in a matter of hours, rather than days, as was usually the case when corresponding with Petri. The letter did not come by owl, but rather by house elf while Harry was in the loo.

There was a telltale pop behind him and Harry shoved his robes closed before whirling around, only to come face-to-face with Rosenkol's too-large black eyes.

"What are you doing here?" Harry demanded, trying to discreetly do up his trousers with just one hand. He had never got out of the mugglish habit of wearing them under his robes. In response, Rosenkol threw a piece of parchment at him. Harry caught it on instinct and pried the folds open with his thumb and forefinger. It was blank.

Before he could ask, Rosenkol said, "The password is Feuerwald. Wizardling is not to be misplacing parchment without clearing it." Then the elf vanished as instantly as he'd arrived.

"Feuerwald," Harry said obligingly to the parchment. Immediately, dark green ink blossomed across the page in Petri's neat, looping handwriting.

"Lieber Harry," it said at the top. Of course it would be in German. Harry scanned the rest of the letter nervously, hoping he was up to the task of reading it.

_It is probably unnecessary to go this far, but foresight is better than hindsight. I do not want to challenge the Dark Lord. Do not leave this parchment in plain sight. Best hide it among your other parchments, or burn it. You must say the password again to clear it._

_Drinking unicorn blood is a provisional solution to a permanent problem. After the first drink, one becomes dependent on the blood, which temporarily works against its own curse. If one goes too long without drinking, one will sink into a deep, incurable heavy-spirit…_

Here Harry paused and frowned at the word, before trying the dictionary spell. It came up with "melancholy, depression, gloom."

… _a deep, incurable depression that leads shortly to suicide. People who believe in such things say that the curse either destroys one's afterlife, or condemns one to eternal pain after death, but those claims are obviously not proven._

_Unless the Dark Lord is a fool, which I do not believe, he is not the one drinking unicorn blood. Either it is a servant of his, or somebody unrelated._

_I recommend you inform Dumbledore. Write him an anonymous note with a dicta-quill and send it with Rosenkol. However, if the Dark Lord makes himself known to you, you must cooperate with him no matter what. Your life will depend on it._

_If you have questions, send them with Rosenkol._

_Yours,_

_JP_

Well, that was reassuring. Play both sides—was that it? Harry supposed it was sensible. Ostensibly, Headmaster Dumbledore, one of the most powerful wizards on the right side of the law, was, well, on the right side. Only, Harry himself was half tangled up on the wrong side, had done things that probably stuck him firmly on the wrong side, even, and he had nothing but Headmaster Dumbledore's goodwill and Lord Voldemort's yet-unknown motivation to defend him from two unfathomably powerful wizards.

"Feuerwald," Harry muttered to the parchment, and was gratified to see it abruptly turn blank. He folded it up and shoved it in his pocket. He had an anonymous note to write.

Creeping out of the toilet, and he glanced around the dormitory and ascertained that it was still empty before he went rummaging for some parchment. Petri had obviously forgotten the part where he didn't _have_ a dicta-quill.

Instead, he set the parchment on his side table and started casting the colour-change charm on it. Getting the letters to come out right was much more difficult than Petri or his professors made it look, and he kept making misshapen blobs.

"Quirrell is drinking unicorn blood in the forest," he finally managed to print.

It wasn't quite as impersonal and regular as a dicta-quill would have managed, but he didn't see why Dumbledore would recognise his mangled handwriting out of a hundred students anyway. He folded up the note and, after an uncertain moment, called out, "Rosenkol!"

Thankfully, the elf popped into view immediately.

Harry frowned. "I thought you couldn't apparate on Hogwarts grounds," he muttered. Now that he had a moment to think, he distinctly remembered seeing something to that effect in _Hogwarts, a History_.

"Wizards cannot be apparating," Rosenkol corrected. "Elves be apparating anywhere."

That sounded like a rather disturbing security risk, Harry thought.

"Oh," he said. "Can you deliver this to Professor Dumbledore then? Preferably while he's not there. Like his office, or something."

"Rosenkol understands," said Rosenkol, taking the offered note and disapparating with a snap of his fingers.

Harry sighed and tried to put the whole matter out of his mind. He just needed to cancel his meetings with Professor Quirrell somehow, as soon as he could, and then he wouldn't have to be involved any longer.

Somewhat to his surprise, the meetings cancelled themselves, or rather, Professor Quirrell failed to show up even to Defence lessons, apparently unwell again. After about two weeks of an ill-tempered Professor Snape as a substitute Defence teacher, Harry began to suspect that his anonymous tip had done more than he'd expected, and that Professor Quirrell had actually been cut off from unicorn blood.

Did that mean he was going to die? Was he already dead?

Easter morning, Harry stewed uncertainly over his hot cross buns, hardly able to taste them. All the Easter holiday had passed with Professor Quirrell's seat at the high table empty. It hadn't been much of a holiday, with the majority of students in Ravenclaw remaining at the castle to get a head start revising for exams, which were scarcely more than a month away. All the other professors had been present to hold their office hours, which made his absence all the more conspicuous.

"What happens if we fail our exams?" Terry wondered aloud, looking about as glum as Harry felt, though probably for different reasons.

"You're not going to fail," said Anthony.

"Yeah," Lisa agreed, for once. "You're a clever chap."

"Thanks," Terry muttered. "But what if? Maybe I should skip racing practice today..."

"You should just drop racing," said Lisa. "What's the point? You can't even compete."

Terry looked quite torn between argument and agreement. Harry, who found the opportunity to do insane aerial stunts every Sunday rather exhilarating, tried to step in.

"You'll be fine. Don't you have an E average?" he asked Terry.

"I've got a A in Defence," Terry muttered. "Bloody Snape." This was said very quietly, and with a furtive glance to the high table, as if Professor Snape might be listening in on their conversation at this very moment. Harry glanced up as well, unable to help himself, and was again greeted with the sight of Professor Quirrell's vacant place.

"He's better than Quirrell ever was," said Lisa. "At least he actually teaches."

"That's exactly the problem," said Terry.

"Do you know what's happened to Professor Quirrell?" Harry asked, though he supposed he probably had the most information out of everybody.

"Finally gone and offed himself I bet," said Lisa. Harry leaned in, feeling himself blanch.

"What? No! Not actually?" he blurted.

"I didn't mean literally," she rushed to say, holding up her hands. There was an awkward pause, and Harry took a large bite of his bun to avoid having to say anything. It tasted like paper in his dry mouth.

 _What's done is done_ , he told himself, taking one last glance at the high table. Somebody who drank unicorn blood, anyway, knew that they were getting themselves into something inextricable. Professor Quirrell was the one who had chosen to do it.

But had he really? Harry had got the idea by now that, unless one was Albus Dumbledore, one did not simply refuse the Dark Lord and expect to live. It was an unpleasant thought that stuck in his churning gut like a lump of lard.

On Monday, when lessons resumed, Harry found himself almost relieved to see Professor Quirrell back behind his desk in place of a surly Professor Snape. The man looked more like a walking corpse than any inferius Harry had ever seen, but he seemed to be alive, at least.

Having grown complacent from Professor Snape's utter lack of interest in him, or rather, utter lack of ability to recognise him, he was blindsided when Professor Quirrell manoeuvred in between him and the classroom door with a stuttered, "Mr P-Potter."

"Er, yes, sir? Good to see you, er, recovered, sir," said Harry, trying without success to sidle past, as if he had somewhere to be.

"Thank you, Mr Potter," said Professor Quirrell without much enthusiasm. "Would, would you like to resume our usual sessions this evening?"

"Er, are you sure you're..." Harry wasn't certain how to phrase it kindly that Professor Quirrell looked like death warmed over.

"Very sure," said Professor Quirrell in complete monotone. Bloodshot, fish-like eyes were set deep in his skull, and Harry had to suppress a shudder.

"All right then," said Harry, finding himself incapable of generating an excuse for refusal.

Like the last time Professor Quirrell had been ill, it seemed that their meeting would be taking place in his quarters, rather than the office proper. The password had evidently been changed back to "Peppercorn," as well, and Harry wondered if it was entirely for his benefit. That seemed like excessive paranoia.

Then again, he thought a little guiltily, he _had_ tried to sneak into Professor Quirrell's rooms at one point, so perhaps it was warranted.

This time, he walked down the pitch dark hallway leading to Professor Quirrell's room with more confidence. The door at the end was wide open, though dimly lit by only glowing embers in the fireplace, and he stopped to announce his presence at the threshold with a soft, "Hello, Professor."

There was no response for a long moment, and Harry wondered if the professor had fallen asleep again.

Then he felt a moment of horrible foreboding, and without further warning his scar was on fire, like the cruciatus curse had concentrated itself into his forehead. He couldn't move; he was bound tightly in endless coils but the where and how of it escaped him completely. He felt long and sinuous, and yet simultaneously bodiless.

But that wasn't right. Through the agony, he saw himself, somehow, standing up, even walking forward, haltingly. How could he remain upright when it hurt so much?

 _It's all in my head_ , he thought.

"Harry Potter," he said out loud, in a drawn out whisper, but he couldn't have been the one to say it. "Let me in."

_In? In where? Let me out!_

With that thought, the pain suddenly disappeared, as if it were never there, leaving no aching aftermath. Quite like the cruciatus in that regard, he noted a little numbly.

He'd been let out. The red eyes were still there, watching from behind his own eyes, but his body, it was out, no longer engulfed by the coils of the red eyed creature. They had rolled up tightly and fit themselves into the crevices of his being, and by the moment he was forgetting what they felt like, and then he couldn't feel them at all. Only the eyes were left.

Glancing up at the Professor Quirrell's full-length mirror, he froze. His eyes shined red, and they pierced the darkness easily without the help of his spectacles, which were horribly askew on his face. What had just happened to him? He crossed the room to get a closer look, and only confirmed what he'd first seen. Unmistakably red eyes, bright like a cat's. Behind him, Professor Quirrell, it was plainly obvious, was out cold on his bed, still as pale as a corpse. He might even be dead.

"He's not dead," Harry said aloud, and again he was sure he hadn't meant to say anything. He felt the sudden urge to giggle, so he did. He laughed uncontrollably for some long seconds, but then bewilderment began to overtake amusement and he frowned at his stubbornly red-eyed reflection.

"What is going on?" he asked himself.

"Your lesson for today," said his reflection wryly, and he felt his mouth move without his bidding. He looked past himself in the mirror at the prone Professor Quirrell once more. Was he responsible for this, whatever "this" was?

But no. The professor wouldn't have referred to himself in the third person. It was somebody else. And who else could it be?

"Lord Voldemort?" he guessed, and it felt so true that the expected moment of self-doubt never came. The Dark Lord was here. A thrill of terror shot through his heart, but then it faded without a trace, overwhelmed by surprise and confusion.

How was this even possible? Where was here? All that came out was, "Where?"

His reflection smiled at him, almost indulgently.

Right here. In his body. Somehow.

"How?"

"I admit, I did not expect it to be so easy," he said. "Most generous of you to share your body with someone in need. I simply knocked, and you let me in."

That was right, Harry remembered. He'd let in the red eyed creature, the Dark Lord. There hadn't exactly been any other option.

"What are you going to do?" Harry asked. Was the Dark Lord planning to take his body and simply abscond with it? He shuddered, the beginnings of panic stirring in his chest. Whatever the case, there was nothing he could do about it. How was he supposed to fight someone who was literally in his body?

"Do not fear, Harry," said the Dark Lord. "I mean you no harm. Have I not taught you, helped you all this time? I ask only a small favour of you now, Harry. Lend me your strength."

"How?" Harry asked, when he finally managed to comprehend the implication of the Dark Lord's words. He must have been in Professor Quirrell's body all year, just like this, and of course that explained everything, and in particular how Professor Quirrell could recognise Harry. Well, at least, it seemed less implausible that the Dark Lord, and not just some random professor, had the wherewithal to bypass the _fidelius_ charm, though the exact mechanism still escaped him.

"Just like this," said the Dark Lord. "Lie down. Relax. Let me teach you about possession."

"Possession? So that's what this is?" Harry understood the general idea, of course, just from muggle stories about demons and ghosts. But he couldn't recall ever hearing about it in the wizarding world, and hadn't entertained that it was a real phenomenon until now. He lay down on the soft rug as bidden and stared up at the ceiling, where he could make out every ridge and crack. Cautiously, he pulled his glasses the rest of the way off his face, and his vision blurred for only a second before sharpening once more into impossible perfection. He pressed his lips together to hold back a question, but then his mouth began to move to answer it anyway.

"Yes. My eyes, as you will have noticed, have manifested by replacing yours. Physical transformation is a common side effect of voluntary possession."

Harry was a little sceptical about the "voluntary" part. He recalled being in excruciating pain at the time. Was coerced permission really still permission?

Wary of offending the Dark Lord, he asked, "What's involuntary possession like then?"

"Brief," said the Dark Lord. "Painful."

So it was just the excruciating pain part, and then he supposed it would be over.

"Professor Quirrell didn't have red eyes," Harry said, glancing to the side, where the professor remained insensate on his bed. He didn't, did he? Harry rather thought it was something he would have noticed.

"No," the Dark Lord agreed. "He had my face on the back of his head."

Despite himself, Harry reached up in alarm to pat at his own head, but all he felt was a soft handful of hair. He laughed mirthlessly, chagrin and unease warring within him as he lay back down.

"Why, er, why did that happen?" he asked, hoping it wasn't going to be a further development. He didn't want to walk around with a ridiculous smelly turban all the time, and anyway the very idea of having a second face was just horrific.

"His soul and mine are not compatible," said the Dark Lord.

Harry frowned. Just what was that supposed to mean? "And ours are?"

The Dark Lord did not answer for a long while, and then he finally said, "Yes; to a much higher degree."

Sensing reluctance, Harry decided not to press the topic. It still felt surreal that he was speaking to the Dark Lord, and yet, it was also familiar. They had been meeting all year, after all, and Harry just hadn't known it, so this ought not to be any different.

But it _was_ different. Why had the Dark Lord chosen to reveal himself now, like this?

"What are your questions?" asked the Dark Lord. Harry took another moment to think of something safer to ask.

"Professor Quirrell is ill," he began. "Is that why you, er, possessed me instead?"

"Yes... more or less. A long possession is very taxing on the body. But I cannot go without a host, for I am mere shadow and vapour. A shadow does not see, or speak, or move on its own. Do you understand? You reduced me to this. Now, it is only fitting that you will help to restore me."

"All right," Harry agreed, to preclude any misunderstanding. He had no choice, did he? His heart sank lower than he ever thought it could go, leaving him cold. "But, sorry, what do you mean I, er, reduced you? I didn't do anything, I don't think."

"Perhaps you did not," the Dark Lord allowed after a beat. "I blame you as one blames a stone in the street for a fall. You exist, and that's the trouble."

A familiar sentiment, and Harry still very much did not like the sound of it.

"I quite like existing," he said, though it failed utterly to come out as smoothly as he had intended, and instead escaped as a stuttered whisper.

Now he felt it, his heart fluttering and his whole body winding tighter by the second. Despite it, or perhaps because of it, he laughed. Or did the Dark Lord laugh? He could not tell.

"You are useful yet," said the Dark Lord. "Fear not."

And he did not fear. In the most peculiar fashion, his breathing evened and his muscles uncoiled, tension melting away until he remained only a serene puddle on the floor.

 _This is what it feels like to be Lord Voldemort_ , he thought vaguely.

He must have fallen asleep, because the next thing he knew he was waking up in his bed in Ravenclaw Tower, a beam of sunlight shining directly in his face. He sat up straight, shivering as he shed his covers abruptly. The bed hangings had been tied back, and he patted furiously at the bedside table for his glasses before finally discovering them on the far side, placed neatly into their case.

That alone confirmed that it most certainly had not been a dream, that he really had been possessed by the Dark Lord.

Was he still possessed?

No, he doubted it. For one, he couldn't see anything, and the Dark Lord's almost preternaturally perfect vision had been, admittedly, a nice change. Shoving his spectacles onto his face remedied that problem, and he set about looking for his wand, which wasn't on the table nor in his robe pocket. He was halfway to spinning in circles and wringing his hands when he finally unearthed it from, of all places, under his pillow.

There was also a note there. How considerate.

"Remember to report to Professor Quirrell's office on Friday at 8. Detention for stealing."

Scratch that. How inconsiderate. He frowned at the last part. Stealing what?

He hurried to his robe, which had been hung up by itself in the wardrobe, and dug around in the pocket for his remembrall. Even before his fingertips brushed against it, however, he realised with some panic what the stolen item had to be. The time machine!

Indeed, no amount of rummaging under his bed or in his pockets produced it, and he could only conclude that the Dark Lord had somehow taken it. _Stupid, stupid_. Which exactly was the stupid thing he'd done, he wasn't sure, but he was definitely stupid. He buried his face in his hands.

Presently, there was rustling and groaning to his side, and he remembered that it was a Tuesday morning, and he had dorm-mates whose greatest worries were probably lessons and exams. Those were things he ought to be worried about as well, but after last night they seemed impossibly irrelevant.

"What time is it?" Stephen mumbled, one arm across his face to block out the light and no wand in sight.

"What time is it?" Harry obligingly asked his wand. "Six."

"Too early," said Stephen, and rolled over.

He was right, Harry thought. It was too early to be up, and certainly too early to be having a mental breakdown. Detention on Friday. Well, the Dark Lord hardly seemed to be in a rush over the matter. Tossing his wand and glasses on the bedside table, Harry unfastened the hangings to block out the outside world and flopped back onto his bed, resolutely pushing his unease away.


	32. Vessel

"It was an accident!" Harry blurted as Professor Quirrell opened the door to his office. The man looked much better, almost well, a faint pinkish tinge to his skin and meat on his bones. "I'm sorry sir. I saw you disappear with your time machine—"

"Time turner," Professor Quirrell interjected.

"—and I didn't know that's what it was so I took it and tried it and then—"

"Potter," said Professor Quirrell, stepping out and ushering Harry inside. Harry stopped talking and wiped his sweaty palms on his robe. "What possessed you to just activate an unknown magical artefact?"

"I know it was really stupid," Harry admitted. "I was just curious. I wasn't thinking."

Professor Quirrell gave him a long, considering look. "Be more careful in the future," he finally said. "Anyway, that isn't what I—what my master wanted you here for."

"It isn't?" Given the note he'd been left, Harry had been quite afraid that that would be the focus of the meeting.

He glanced around. Where was the Dark Lord anyway? Not on Professor Quirrell's head, it seemed. He wasn't wearing his turban, and the skin on the back of his head was thankfully smooth and shiny.

"This way," said Professor Quirrell, ushering him towards the back door of his office, which Harry only now realised was already open.

He felt immediately a stirring of unease in his gut, like barely-subdued panic ready to spring into full force at the slightest provocation. The last time he had traversed that corridor, he had been beset by the body-stealing spirit of the Dark Lord.

Then again, how could it get any worse than that?

Steeling himself, he preceded Professor Quirrell inside. There was nowhere to run, and he wasn't a coward.

As he passed an open door to the side of the corridor, Professor Quirrell made a small, nasal sound and gestured for him to turn there, instead of towards the bedroom. Beyond the threshold was a cramped kitchenette of sorts, with only room for a sink, a little square table covered with a blue and green chequered cloth, and two high-backed wooden chairs. Harry took one of the chairs as Professor Quirrell bade him sit down.

"You haven't told Dumbledore about me," said Professor Quirrell, and by his level tone Harry was sure he meant it as a statement, and tried not to jump into panic.

"No," he agreed. Well, he'd told Dumbledore about the unicorn blood, but that had been ages ago, so it didn't count.

"Why not?" asked Professor Quirrell, sitting down and waving his wand at a nearby teakettle, which rumbled and promptly began to spout steam.

Harry blinked at him, perplexed. It honestly hadn't occurred to him, even, to involve Dumbledore again. He had considered asking Petri for about two seconds before he realised that Petri had already provided his advised course of action. _If the Dark Lord makes himself known, cooperate with him no matter what._

"Why would I?" he finally said. "Sir?"

Professor Quirrell obviously had not expected the question to be turned around on him. He said nothing for a few seconds, taking the time to summon some cups and pour them both tea, before finally producing, "Well, yes, of course you wouldn't. Very good. Er, now to why you're here; my master is in need of a host again."

He said it sort of haltingly, like he wanted to be apologetic, but was too relieved to mean it. Harry supposed he too would object much more strongly to possession if the Dark Lord's face sprouted out of the back of his head every time.

"Okay," he said, adding a sugar cube from a nearby bowl to his tea. He found himself surprisingly apathetic to the entire prospect. "Not permanently, right? It's just, I think somebody would notice if I walked around with red eyes."

"Only until I recover my strength," Professor Quirrell reassured him.

Harry studied him again over his tea, and confirmed that he did look better than he had a few days ago. He frowned. "I thought unicorn blood cursed you permanently," he said.

"You know about that?" Professor Quirrell said, surprised. He shook his head, smiling wanly. "Well, I am infinitely fortunate to have Lord Voldemort on my side. You must understand, he is truly a great wizard. He's gone further than any other, and done things that weaker wizards have long considered impossible."

"You mean he has a cure? A countercurse?" Harry demanded, setting down his cup with rattling force. That... "That's incredible. That would make unicorn blood actually useful. It could save lives."

Professor Quirrell laughed bitterly after taking a long sip. "That's right," he said. "Perhaps I really was just exceedingly foolish. If even you, a child, find it so obvious..."

"What?"

"I used to think that it was evil to harm, let alone kill a unicorn," said Professor Quirrell, smiling without mirth, as if mocking himself.

"I think most people think that," Harry said, recalling all the books he'd read that had danced around the subject and used words like "reprehensible" or "irredeemable."

"Not you, and not Lord Voldemort," said Professor Quirrell. Harry was about to correct him on the former, but then decided it would be foolish. Also, he supposed Professor Quirrell might have a point. If it came down to it, he would choose his own life or the life of somebody he cared about over a unicorn's, every time. It followed that he didn't think killing one was an unforgivable sin. In fact, he'd done it, and forgiven himself, hadn't he?

"So?" Harry asked, not seeing the point.

"So you aren't blinded by weakness, like I was, for so long. You may have only just begun your studies, but you aren't afraid of what you don't know. Everything my master and I have shown you, you've attempted with enthusiasm."

Harry wasn't sure he would go quite as far as to call himself "enthusiastic," but Professor Quirrell sounded genuinely impressed by his paltry progress.

"I am a Ravenclaw," Harry said, a little jokingly.

"Quite the example of one," Professor Quirrell agreed. He sighed, almost wistfully, and pushed himself to his feet. "I suppose we can't delay any longer. I shall take you to him."

Harry stood to follow him, wondering why Professor Quirrell had gone to all the trouble of having tea with him beforehand, anyway. He frowned.

"Where is he? Not on you?" Harry asked, though he was fairly certain of that, given Professor Quirrell's lack of a second face.

"He is possessing a snake," Professor Quirrell explained. "But they degrade very quickly." He sounded nervous.

Degrade. It was sort of ominous to hear it said, even though Harry had already seen the effect possession had had on Professor Quirrell's health.

"Right," he muttered, and followed Professor Quirrell into his bedroom.

A small snake with red and black stripes slithered languidly across the floor and coiled up at Harry's feet, raising its tiny head somewhat and tasting the air with a flickering tongue.

"Hello Harry," said the snake. "So good of you to come. Now, give me your hand."

Harry bent down and held his hand out cautiously, halfway struck by the irrational fear that the snake would dart forward and bite him. No such thing happened, and it only moved forward to wind itself up his arm. Simultaneously, he felt a coiling, prickling sensation all over his body, which was clearly psychological, just as if somebody were watching him and judging him, only a thousand times stronger and on the edge of painful. The feeling tightened and his breath hitched unnecessarily, and then he saw a burning red gaze for a moment in his mind's eye before all the strange sensations disappeared in an instant.

There was the very physical feeling of the snake dropping off his arm. His head whipped around automatically to track it, but it seemed to evaporate into black smoke before it hit the ground.

"That was it?" he asked aloud, addressing Professor Quirrell for lack of any other visible interlocutor. The man flinched when Harry looked at him, and continued to remain very still.

"That was it," Harry said again, without intending it, and he felt his lips curl upward. "Quirinus."

"Master?" said Professor Quirrell in a very small voice.

"Get some rest," Harry said, and then laughed as if it were some kind of inside joke. He began walking in a tall way, his back stiffer and straighter than he ever remembered it being, and had stalked out of Professor Quirrell's office entirely by the time he managed to recollect his wits—that was, his _own_ wits.

"Where are we going?" he asked himself.

"The library," said Lord Voldemort, still piloting his body with supreme confidence.

The library? How mundane. For some reason, this was the funniest thing Harry had heard all day. He laughed and regretted it immediately.

"Does that surprise you?" asked the Dark Lord. "Reading is a favourite pastime of mine. I'm sure you feel the same way."

"Well, yes, I suppose," Harry said, mystified at the thought of the Dark Lord having a pastime at all, besides terrorising the nation.

Thankfully, they met nobody Harry knew on the way to the library, and the Dark Lord slid into the stacks with purpose. He made his way straight to the end of the Divination shelf, trailed Harry's fingers across a few copies of _Unfogging the Future_ , and then landed on _The Fateful Word: Grammatica in the Past_ , whose dull green spine for some reason looked very familiar, even though Harry was sure he hadn't read it before.

As Lord Voldemort carefully lowered them into a chair and opened the book with what Harry could only describe as a caress, his eyes landed on the preface and Harry remembered that this was one of the books he had shown Vince in an attempt to test the other boy's magical reading abilities.

"Kindly relinquish control of your eyes," Lord Voldemort admonished, flipping to the middle of the book. Harry tried very hard not to look, and was rewarded with the distinctly creepy awareness of how his eyeballs were rotating in their sockets independently of his command. He soon discovered that it was pretty much impossible to actually read while possessed, because his gaze would jump around unexpectedly and generally too quickly for the text to make any sense. The Dark Lord apparently read at a monstrous speed.

It did not take long for boredom to overcome caution, and about a dozen pages in, Harry asked, "So what's it about? I can't follow."

Lord Voldemort stopped reading for a long moment without saying anything, before giving a surprisingly patient response: "It is about a magical phenomenon where writing down predictions about the future make those predictions more likely to happen. The so-called 'fateful word' effect. I am doing research for a personal project of mine."

Understanding from the finality of his tone that the next interruption would be far less welcome, Harry accepted this explanation and tried to entertain himself by guessing the content of each page from the words he saw most often. This chapter was dominated by "prophecy," and the Dark Lord seemed especially interested in "Retrospective Interpretation," whatever that meant, because he read that section twice. Then he skipped what must have been half the book and landed on a chapter titled, "Prophetic Risk Mitigation."

After what felt like an eternity, but probably hadn't been more than an hour, the Dark Lord closed the book and returned it to the shelf with a casual flick of Harry's wand. He sat awhile longer, twirling the wand between the tips of his fingers, and then stood abruptly, sweeping out of the library and heading up the stairs. Somehow, all the moving staircases slotted themselves into place right as they reached each landing, and they managed to attain a straight path up to the seventh floor. They took a right, spun around, and then proceeded down the trick hallway until they reached a very familiar tapestry.

It was the location of Elaine's study room and Draco's room of rubbish. The Dark Lord spun on the spot three times, summoning the door, and they entered, revealing the rubbish room again.

"You have been here before," said Lord Voldemort. It wasn't a question.

"Yeah," Harry admitted.

"Interesting. _Colloportus. Silencio_ ," the Dark Lord cast, sweeping the wand in a wide arc. " _Protego horribilis._ " Harry wondered why he was protecting against dark magic in the middle of Hogwarts. Paranoia, perhaps? "Now that we won't be overheard, I have some things I wanted to discuss with you, Harry Potter," said Lord Voldemort, sitting down on the floor and twirling the wand between his fingers again. It seemed to be a habit of his.

"Okay," said Harry, when it was clear that he expected a response.

"I have been thinking, and some things do not add up. Clarify to me, Harry, how you came to be attacked by a vampire."

Of course the Dark Lord started right off treading at the edge of dangerous territory. Was Harry supposed to be honest about things? Petri had said to cooperate with the Dark Lord. He supposed it was logical that that extended to not lying to him.

"He's our landlord," Harry said. "It's, er, complicated. He wanted me in his company. That's like, a family, sort of."

"I am aware of what a company is," said Lord Voldemort, cutting him off. "Your landlord is a vampire. You must live in a magical settlement. With an uncle. But Harry Potter doesn't have a magical uncle. I know this for a fact."

"He's not my real uncle," Harry admitted before the Dark Lord could get carried away with speculation, or rather, this alarming pattern of deduction.

"Then who is he?"

"His name is Joachim Petri. We're not related or anything," Harry said, wondering if he'd just doomed the man.

But the Dark Lord did not seem to recognise the name or pay it much mind. "How did you come into his care? Did Dumbledore send you to live with him?"

"Dumbledore?" Harry repeated. "No! Why would…"

"What is it?" Lord Voldemort pressed as Harry trailed off.

He had been about to say that the headmaster had had nothing to do with anything, but then remembered that it was Professor Dumbledore who had shown up to personally deliver his Hogwarts letter, along with some kind of cryptic threat for Petri. But the Dark Lord couldn't have known about that, so why would he ever jump to the conclusion that Professor Dumbledore had been involved?

He cleared his throat and tried again. "Why would Dumbledore be sending me anywhere?"

"An educated guess," Lord Voldemort said, dodging the question. Harry sighed.

"My uncle, I mean, you know, he does know Dumbledore, I suppose. He mentioned that Dumbledore pardoned him after a war, or something. But I think that's just a coincidence," Harry said.

"The war?" Lord Voldemort repeated, sitting up straighter. "What did you say your alleged uncle's name was again?"

"Joachim Petri," Harry mumbled. He felt his lips twist into a frown.

"He's foreign?" muttered the Dark Lord, testing the syllables of the name under his breath.

"German," said Harry, and then felt his head jerk up very suddenly so that he was staring at the vaulted ceiling for a dazed moment.

"And how old is he?" Lord Voldemort demanded, now gazing into the distance where the blindingly bright corner of a window peeked out over a tower of rubbish.

"Er, dunno," said Harry. "Fifty?" He remembered Mr Tibbles' alleged age. "No, wait, more than that. Seventy?"

"He must have served Grindelwald," Lord Voldemort concluded.

The name sounded quite familiar, but Harry couldn't put his finger on it. "Who?"

"Gellert Grindelwald, who fought to unite wizardkind and put muggles in their place? Have you learned nothing in History of Magic?"

"No," said Harry. "Binns is complete rubbish."

"Of course he is," the Dark Lord sighed. "So, Dumbledore has you living with a former follower of Grindelwald. That makes absolutely no sense unless… I expect he has renounced the dark arts, then?"

Harry snorted loudly. Petri, renounce the dark arts? The man lived and breathed them.

"I take that as a 'no.' Of course. Your aptitude for curses is impressive. It must have come from somewhere." The Dark Lord tapped Harry's wand against his knee in frustration. "Then why?"

"Why what?"

"Why would Dumbledore allow his precious Boy-Who-Lived to remain with a dark wizard?"

What a funny question. Harry rather thought that the Dark Lord had missed the point entirely.

"I really don't think Dumbledore has much to do with it," he said. "If you must know, I was sort of kidnapped."

That was what it was, wasn't it? It was embarrassing to look back on, but at the same time, if he hadn't taken Petri's hand in the park that night, he would still be stuck with muggles and likely getting his head shoved into a toilet by his stupid cousin. Then again, he was now sharing a body with a mass murderer who had killed his parents, and that was probably just as horrifying in a different way.

"Kidnapped. And yet you are here, attending Hogwarts," said Lord Voldemort.

"My master wanted me to go to school."

Harry realised his mistake just as the Dark Lord repeated, "Your master?"

"I'm actually his apprentice, yes," Harry said hurriedly, wresting control of his body away before the Dark Lord could say anything untoward.

"You are eleven," said Lord Voldemort, as if he had just realised this fact for the first time.

Reminded of Silviu's constant complaints about his being too young, Harry scowled. "If I'm old enough to be kidnapped and possessed, then I'm old enough to study whatever I want." He flinched as the burst of frustration ended, remembering just who his interlocutor was.

The Dark Lord smiled with his face, and all fear instantly melted from Harry's body. "Quite." He remained silent for a few moments, as if lost in thought, and then said, "I am pleased that you shared all this with me, Harry. It has been… enlightening. Regretfully, I need to rest to regain my strength, so I shall leave you to your day."

There was a strange shifting somewhere, perhaps off to the left, or in the back of his head, and then Harry felt that he was in complete control of his body. Cautiously, he stood up and tugged his glasses off his face. As he suspected would happen, his vision blurred only for a moment before sharpening to perfection, and the same thing happened again when he put his glasses back on. He looked around for something to check his reflection in. Venturing into one of the narrow pathways between the rubbish piles yielded a fist-sized shard from a broken mirror.

His irises were still red, though in the daylight it wasn't extremely evident that there was anything unnatural about them. That didn't mean his friends wouldn't notice if they got too close.

"Can you cast a colour-change charm on yourself?" he asked under his breath. There was no response. He decided that pointing his wand at his own eyes without confirmation that it was safe was probably a bad idea, and that perhaps he should charm his glasses into sunglasses instead.

He felt foolish after his charm had absolutely no effect, and remembered that his glasses were already enchanted.

"Vampires have red eyes, don't they?" Harry mumbled to himself. He could probably come up with some excuse related to his made-up vampiric heritage if anybody asked. Who spent time staring into other people's eyes, anyway?

Tossing the mirror shard away, he turned to leave, only to find that the door was locked. Right; Lord Voldemort had charmed it.

" _Alohamora_ ," he muttered, and exited into the corridor, only to stumble right into Neville.

"Oh, hello Harry," said the other boy with a small wave. "What are you doing up here?"

"Er, practising spells," Harry lied, staring at the ground.

"What spells?" Neville asked most unfortunately.

"Structure sight," Harry said. "You know, the one I've been working on for Professor Flitwick." He really ought to actually practise that spell. "What about you, what are you doing?"

"Just heading down to dinner," said Neville, surprising Harry with how late it apparently was already.

"Oh, right. Me too," said Harry, and turned to begin walking towards the stairs.

Neville hurried to catch up and gave him a shy look from beneath his fringe. "Hey, do you want to practise the growth charm with me after dinner? I mean, if you have time. I asked Professor Sprout, and she didn't want us to go in the greenhouse without her, but she said Hagrid grows all sorts of food behind his hut, so I asked him, and he said we can practise there."

It was obvious that Neville had put quite a bit of thought and planning into this request, given he had even gone to ask Professor Sprout for permission. Harry felt guilty that he hadn't got around to learning any of the spells in the horticulture book that Neville had gifted him. They honestly did seem very interesting, especially with their food-production potential.

"Sure," he agreed. "I'm free all evening."

He paused for a moment, remembering his mental passenger, but there was no reaction at all from the Dark Lord. If he didn't know better, he would think himself entirely free of possession.

"Let's meet up after eating then?" Harry suggested as they approached the Great Hall.

"Oh. I was wondering... do you want to sit with me at the Gryffindor table?" mumbled Neville.

"Sure," Harry said. He knew Neville didn't really have many friends in his own house, and often sat alone at mealtimes. Harry supposed he wasn't that close to any of his dorm mates either, but they were all friendly with each other, which was funny, because he would have expected that sort of group socialisation from literally any other house besides Ravenclaw.

Neville chose a seat near the head table, somewhat removed from the rest of the Gryffindor first years. Harry sat down next to him and reached for a platter of chips. He had just grabbed a handful when Hermione Granger came sliding awkwardly down the bench across from him at speed and said, "Those have garlic on them, you know."

Harry hadn't known, and he dropped them immediately and went for a napkin to wipe his greasy hand on. Then he took out his wand a cast a small scouring charm on his palm, just in case.

"Thanks," he said. "I'm used to the garlic dishes running away from me. I guess they're only charmed to do that at the Ravenclaw table."

"Are they really?" said Hermione. "I suppose that makes sense. By the way, your eyes are red."

This declaration, of course, prompted Neville to finally make eye contact for the first time that evening, and then immediately flinch.

"I know," Harry said, since there was no point in prevaricating about it. "Don't worry about it."

"The eyes of part vampires turn red when they're angry or they haven't had enough blood," Hermione continued blithely. Neville paled fidgeted in his seat, food forgotten.

"I _know_ ," Harry emphasised, wishing that the girl could take a hint. "But it's nothing. I don't even need blood."

"That can't be true," Hermione maintained. "I read that blood is the central property of the vampire curse, so if you're hurt by garlic, it means you need blood too."

Harry wished he could tell her that not everything she read was true, but she was probably right. It wasn't as if he could admit that he had lied about his vampiric relations, and that was why she was wrong about the blood. He didn't know as much as he ought to about people who were born part-vampire, but he had pieced together from Silviu and Petri that as a living human in a vampire company, he wasn't expected to exhibit any physical changes.

Instead, he said, "Whatever. It's none of your business, you know," and grabbed a piece of bread, chewing on it with emphasis.

Hermione huffed, but did not move away, instead pulling her plate over to her. "Why are you at the Gryffindor table, anyway?" she asked.

"Neville invited me," Harry said. Wasn't that obvious?

"We're going to practise some spells after dinner," Neville said, evidently eager to move on from the topic of Harry's alleged vampirism. "Er, would you like to join us?"

Harry bit back a groan, hoping that Hermione would refuse, but of course she was the sort who would jump at any chance for extra studying.

"What sorts of spells?" she asked, leaning forward.

"Ones for growing plants," Neville told her. "Hagrid said we could practise on his garden. Did you know he was the one who grew all the pumpkins and turnips at Halloween?"

"Did he really?" said Hermione. "I didn't think there was that much space behind his hut."

Hermione was right. The hut, though scaled up to accommodate Hagrid's imposing stature, was still only as wide as the average suburban muggle home, and had a commensurately sized enclosed space behind it. Harry struggled to imagine how all those enormous pumpkins could have possibly fit inside.

It was still light outside when they arrived, though the sun remained concealed behind thick cloud cover. As they approached the hut, Harry heard a loud thump from inside, followed by barking and snarling and the unmistakable crash of shattering glass.

"Do you think everything's all right in there?" Hermione asked.

"Probably not," Harry said, and proceeded to knock on the door. More barking and snarling followed, allow with some muffled shouting, and then the door opened a tiny crack to reveal Hagrid's hairy face and single beady eye. He was pressed strategically against the door frame so that they could not peer inside.

"Oh, evenin' there. You lot can get down there to the gate. I'll meet yeh on the other side," Hagrid said, shutting the door with alacrity.

"That was odd," Hermione said as they walked around to the back of the hut. "Did it seem like he was hiding something?"

"He was definitely hiding something," Harry said.

"It's probably none of our business," Neville pointed out.

As promised, Hagrid met them by the back gate, grasping the top with a hand the size of a dustbin cover and pulling it open to reveal a wide cobblestone path that snaked through dense rows of vegetation. Harry's jaw almost dropped at the sight of dozens of cabbages taller than he was. They were packed tightly together, almost overlapping, and suddenly the idea of a hundred pumpkins growing in this modest space no longer seemed so unlikely.

"Come 'ere, this way," Hagrid said, beckoning for them to follow. He led them around the other side of the hut to a narrow strip of empty land. The soil looked freshly tilled, and there was a musty scent hanging in the air. Hagrid produced a large burlap sack and set it on the ground with a scritch, where it fell open and spilled a small rivulet of flat seeds.

"Pumpkin seeds," he explained. "Ye'r free ter practise on these."

"Thank you, Hagrid," said Hermione, and Harry and Neville murmured their thanks as well. Hagrid gave them a gruff nod and then shuffled away, darting almost furtively into his hut and slamming the door behind him in his haste to close it.

"He's usually friendlier," Neville said, sounding a little mystified.

"You talk with him often?" Harry asked.

"Professor Sprout invited me for tea with him a few times," Neville explained. "He's really nice. But he seems like he's in a rush today."

"He seems preoccupied with something inside," Hermione said. "Did you notice his right hand is all bandaged up? He was trying to hide that too."

"No," said Harry, frowning. He hadn't noticed. He glanced up at the side window of the hut, which was shuttered. Well, if they just wanted to know what was inside, there was a clear solution.

He tapped the side of his glasses and focused, and his vision surged forward through the wall and put him face to face with a gigantic, slit yellow eye. He yelped and stumbled back.

"What?" said Neville.

"I'm trying to see what's inside," he said. "Hold on." More prepared this time, he took another look. The inside of the hut was cosy despite its size, crowded with furniture at Hagrid's scale. The space was dominated by a roughly cut wooden table, on top of which a winged lizard the size of Hagrid's dog was curled into a ball. Hagrid was standing by the blazing hearth, bent over a large bucket and sweating fiercely.

"What do you mean see inside?" Hermione was asking. "Is there a spell for that?"

"He's got a... I think it's a dragon," Harry said, cognisant of how ridiculous that sounded. "A really small dragon." It did resemble one of the animated figurines that Petri sold, only much larger and unmistakably alive.

"What?" she demanded. "Are you sure?"

"A d-dragon?" Neville repeated. "Isn't that illegal?"

"I have no idea," said Harry. "Probably." He thought about all the other illegal things he had seen, and decided that this one did not even deserve to make the list. "Let's just pretend I never saw that."

"What?" Hermione said again. "Dragons breathe fire. It's a wooden hut."

"He seems to have it under control," Harry said, though he did see her point. "Let's start on those pumpkin seeds."

Hermione looked like she was on the verge of storming up to the hut and pounding down the door, but with a glance at Neville, who was resolutely bending down to grab a handful of seeds and strew them across the ground, she deflated in favour of joining him. They kicked a thin layer of soil over the seeds.

"So, the incantation is _engorgio_. It can make things bigger, but it also makes non-magical plants grow faster," Neville explained. "For plants, you do this sort of wiggle, _engorgio!_ "

He moved his wand in an "S" shape and a languid shower of pale blue sparks dribbled onto the ground, which glowed faintly.

"Look," said Neville, bending down and pointing. Harry squinted and saw some tiny green sprouts peeking out of the soil.

Hermione immediately began practising the wand movement, and Harry joined her belatedly. The motion reminded him somewhat of the fire-making charm, only in the reverse direction.

" _Engorgio!_ " Harry tried, pointing to the sprouts. Motes of light streamed out of his wand like ethereal water and a tangle of vines sprang out of the ground, jagged leaves unfurling and slumping onto the soil. A single orange flower bloomed, and then wilted and fell onto the ground as the vines yellowed. "Well, it sort of worked. But it looks kind of dead."

"I think there are other charms you're supposed to use too," Neville said. He dropped his rucksack onto the ground and rummaged around inside for a bit before producing his own copy of _Household Horticulture_ and flipping to a dog-eared page. "Yeah, er, the water-making charm, and the sunlight charm."

"Sounds straightforward," said Harry.

Except he was halfway wrong, because while the sunlight charm was just a variant of _lumos_ , the water-making charm turned out to be a NEWT-level conjuration that was completely beyond any of them.

In the end, Hermione's powers of observation came to the rescue, and she found a large wooden bucket and a water pump near the back door of the hut.

"So how much water do we need?" Harry asked, cranking the pump.

"It says here ten gallons per minute of accelerated growth," Neville read off.

"You're kidding," said Harry. "Ten gallons?" He eyed the bucket, which was probably five gallons at best.

"We won't be able to carry it when it's full," Hermione said.

" _Locomotor_ charm," Harry told her.

"Oh, right," she mumbled.

As far as Harry could tell, the actual weight of an object was irrelevant for the movement charm. Instead, it was only the size that mattered, so it was exactly as easy to lift the bucket of water as it would have been if it were empty. He delegated the work of pouring the water to Hermione. Neville cast the sunlight charm, lighting up the end of his wand with a brilliant beam, and Harry cast the growth charm again.

He counted to thirty in his head before stopping. The resulting vines were a vibrant green.

"It worked! They're healthy," Neville decreed after a minute of inspection, beaming. "Come on, again!"

Harry didn't think he had ever seen Neville this excited. He and Hermione dutifully refilled the water bucket, and this time he traded tasks with Neville.

Neville seemed to have some difficulty getting the spell to work at first, and they had to go back for water a few more times, but eventually orange flowers began to pop up like wildfire, before wilting and curling into hard green orbs which swelled and ripened into honest-to-goodness little pumpkins.

"One more," said Neville, a sheen of sweat coating his forehead.

"Let me try this time," said Hermione. " _Engorgio!_ "

The pumpkins grew larger and larger, then began to swell to ridiculous proportions. A loud crack, and then they were showered with pumpkin guts. Neville laughed uproariously.

"Overdid it a bit," he said. Hermione coughed.

"Ugh, didn't realise that would happen," she muttered, peering up at the split pumpkin. It was taller than she was, and oozing juice from a long crack in its side.

They all froze as a muffled roar shook Hagrid's hut.

"Er, maybe we should leave. It's getting kind of late," Harry said. " _Tergeo_ ," he cast hurriedly, trying to siphon the sticky pumpkin juice out of their robes and hair.

"He'll be okay, right?" Hermione asked.

"I'm sure he knows what he's doing," Harry said, just as another roar sounded behind them.

"Do you think we should get an adult?" asked Hermione, shifting nervously.

"Hagrid is an adult," Harry pointed out. Hermione pursed her lips, but did not object.

Instead, she said, "All right, let's put everything away. I think he got the seeds from over here."

Harry sighed, as he was eager to get out of the vicinity of a possibly angry dragon, however small, as soon as possible. Nonetheless, he obligingly tapped his wand to the seed bag and directed it into the alcove that Hermione indicated while she returned the bucket.

"Harry, can you check on Hagrid, please?" Hermione asked as they gathered by the gate. "I'm just worried."

"What?" said Harry, and then he remembered his glasses. "Right, yeah. One second."

He tapped the frames and peered into the hut. Hagrid was wrestling with the juvenile dragon, uninjured hand clamped over its narrow maw, and bandaged one smacking at its scrabbling wings and claws. He hugged it suddenly to his chest, squishing it, and then shoved it into the fireplace and threw a ragged teddy bear, of all things, on top. The teddy did not catch fire or get torn to pieces when the dragon began chewing on it, so Harry supposed it must be charmed.

"Right. Looks like he's handling it," he told the others.

"Oh all right," Hermione said with a sigh. "Let's go back to the castle then."

The gate was too heavy for them to push, but Harry managed to crack it open with _locomotor_ and they slipped out.

"That was fun," Hermione said. "Do you think we can get _aguamenti_ , though?"

"Not really. It's a sixth-year spell," Neville pointed out.

"But what makes it so hard?" Hermione asked. "I still don't understand what makes some spells harder than others. Isn't it just wand movement and incantation?"

"Well, there's intent and focus too, and just the amount of magic something takes," Harry said. "I think physical conjurations use up quite a bit of magic, so we might literally not be able to do them yet."

"How do they measure how much magic something uses?" Hermione asked.

"Dunno, good question," Harry muttered.

"And does our magic grow with us then? I didn't even realise it was limited. But that makes sense. But then, can we use up all our magic? Is that bad?"

"No," Harry said, seeing an opportunity to halt the incessant stream of questions. "It's not that there's a limited amount of magic, it's that we can only use a certain amount at once." He scrunched up his face and tried to remember the diagram of magical flow. It had been a long time since he last helped make an inferius, and he was getting rusty. "We gather magic here," he patted his navel, "Then it goes up into our heads and then back down to our hands and kind of drains out. So we can only use as much as is coming out at once."

"I've never heard any of that before," Neville said.

"Er, my uncle told me that," Harry said, feeling a sudden surge of doubt. He had always trusted Petri's word when it came to the nature of magic. Could it be the case that Petri had actually told him some fringe theory that wasn't true? But no, he had literally painted the guide paths on an inferius with his own hands and seen Ulrich revived based on the same principles. There was at least some validity to the whole concept of magical flows.

"Let's check the library," said Hermione.

"It's almost curfew," Neville pointed out, and she sighed, as if in affront.

"Tomorrow, then," she said.

Harry split off from Neville and Hermione when they reached the fifth floor. As soon as they were out of earshot, he felt as if his whole body had seized up, except it hadn't and had instead kept moving without his input.

"Your master knows some rather esoteric magic theory," he murmured. Right. The Dark Lord was still possessing him. How could he have forgotten?

"Esoteric," he repeated, seizing the easy response of confusion.

"Theory that not many people have studied," the Dark Lord clarified.

"Oh. Yes, he does know quite a bit," Harry agreed. He had always assumed it was the purview of adult wizards to know these things, but perhaps there was something special about Petri's knowledge, too. "But it sounds like you know the same theories?"

"Of course," said the Dark Lord. "I have always been fascinated by the nature of magic. Why is it that some people are gifted with the ability to mould reality to their will, and others are not?"

Harry waited a moment, and then asked, "Well, why?"

The Dark Lord laughed, and Harry was disturbed to note that it wasn't quite his own laugh after all, but had a different, more sardonic cadence to it.

"It's destiny," the Dark Lord murmured, "Fate. That is the price of having magic."

Harry thought about the lines of fate that Petri always spoke of.

"But muggles have fates too. They die in the end. Everyone dies," he argued.

The Dark Lord laughed again, for some reason.

"No. Muggles live and die freely. No prophecy was ever made about a muggle," he said.

Harry wracked his brains trying to think of some counterexample, but it was true that all the divination he had ever done, mostly necromancy, had implicitly used some magical person or thing as the target.

"So, does that mean you can't do divination on muggles at all?" Harry asked.

"That is correct," said the Dark Lord.

They reached the Ravenclaw common room, and the Dark Lord proceeded to answer the knocker's question with alacrity and gain entrance. Once again, Harry wondered why they couldn't just have a password like the Gryffindors. That seemed much more efficacious for security.

Harry, finding himself abruptly back in control of his body, edged his way around the lively common room and up the stairs. Friday night was game night, and the prefects were very lax about curfew within the tower, but Harry felt that it would be awkward to play Exploding Snap while the Dark Lord was looking out of his eyes.

Instead, he prepared for bed. Was it weird to shower while possessed? Well, the Dark Lord was a man, wasn't he, so it was okay. Or was it? Harry recalled that he had little other choice, anyway.

The Dark Lord at least did not make his presence known again until Harry had climbed into bed. There he seized control and cast the silencing charm around the perimeter.

"Do you use my magical flow when you're doing magic with my body?" Harry wondered suddenly.

"Yes," Lord Voldemort confirmed.

"Does that mean I could cast the silencing charm, in theory?" Harry asked.

"Unlikely," said Lord Voldemort, quashing his hopes. "I am compensating for the lack of ready magic by collecting it in reserve while idle. It is a technique that takes many years to perfect."

"Oh," said Harry, disappointed.

"Magical volume will come in time. For now, there are many very powerful magics which hardly require much actual magic at all," Lord Voldemort said. "Divination, for instance, especially necromancy, as I am sure you know."

Seeing no point in denying it, but mystified nonetheless, Harry said, "Er, yes. But how did you know I know about that?"

"I mentioned fate, and you automatically connected it to death," Lord Voldemort pointed out. "Not a very obvious connection for anyone unfamiliar with necromancy. Also, if your master did serve Grindelwald, I cannot imagine that he could have come away from it without an intimate knowledge of the art."

That was right, Harry thought. He must have heard the name Grindelwald before because of something related to necromancy. But necromancy was just a sort of divination, wasn't it?

"Is divination really that useful?" Harry asked.

To Harry's surprise, the Dark Lord said, "Divination is quite possibly the most useful branch of magic there is. Knowledge is power, and divination is the power to know."

"But then why isn't it a school subject?" Harry asked, sceptical.

"It is two school subjects," the Dark Lord corrected him. "I forget that you are only a first year. In your third year, you will be able to take both a general Divination elective and Arithmancy."

Hearing the Dark Lord talk about his third year reassured Harry somewhat that he wasn't in imminent danger of being murdered.

"Why is Arithmancy separate?" Harry asked. He thought he remembered reading somewhere that arithmancy was especially accurate, but he had little idea of what it even was.

"Arithmancy is the only form of true divination that requires no innate talent," the Dark Lord explained. "As such, it is much more widely studied than any other method."

"Wait, so you need a special talent to do other kinds of divination? How can you tell if you have it?" Harry asked.

Suddenly, Petri's cryptic praise about Harry's knack for doing reconstruction came back to him in a new light.

"Extensive trial and error, mostly, which is largely why they have the general divination course at all. But it is not an uncommon talent. One in two wizards has some form of it. Alas, I am not so gifted."

Harry was rather surprised to hear that there was something the Dark Lord could not do. From the way Petri always spoke of him, mostly with a sense of fatalistic inferiority, Harry had conceived of him as some sort of godly, all-powerful figure.

He frowned. "But you were reading a divination book earlier. Was that Arithmancy, then?"

"Yes. More precisely, grammatica, the application of language to influencing others magically. Ironically, it was my best subject at Hogwarts."

The Dark Lord did not explain why it was ironic, so Harry said, "You went to Hogwarts?" It was hard to imagine the Dark Lord as a student like him, least of all because he had no idea what the man even looked like. Now that he thought about it, though, it was sort of common knowledge that the Dark Lord had been in Slytherin, so of course he had attended Hogwarts.

"A very long time ago," said Lord Voldemort, "but it has changed remarkably little. Dumbledore still has his hands all over everything and the instruction is still mediocre."

"You really don't like Dumbledore," Harry remarked.

"Dumbledore has not ceased to wrong me since the moment we met," said Lord Voldemort. "I do not forgive and I do not forget."

Harry felt suddenly frigid and empty, like all the emotion had drained out of him and the tap had run dry.

It seemed like a difficult way to live, Harry thought. He himself perhaps forgave and forgot too easily. What was the point of holding on to resentment he could not actualise?

Harry wasn't sure if it was he or the Dark Lord who laughed mirthlessly then.

"You intrigue me, Harry." Those, definitively, were the Dark Lord's words. And indeed, he felt, as the Dark Lord felt, the itch of curiosity, sharpened to a point. "I admit, I did not expect you to be anything like this. Perhaps I should have. How could you be ordinary when you exist in such extraordinary circumstances?"

Harry had no idea what the Dark Lord was talking about. Certainly, it was abnormal that he was apprenticed to a dark wizard who had kidnapped him, but all the same he did not feel any less ordinary as a person for it. He was, literally, just Harry, as he always had been.

"Just Harry, is that how you think of yourself?" asked Lord Voldemort, and Harry wondered with some discomfort just how many of his thoughts were privy to to the Dark Lord, and vice versa. He knew there was something there, with emotion, that they shared. How could he not, when the Dark Lord's emotions were so starkly alien?

"Yes," he said out loud.

"And you do not want to be more?" Lord Voldemort asked.

What did that even mean? How could he be more than himself?

"You do not desire power?"

"Well, yes, I do want to get stronger," Harry said. "There are so many spells I can't cast. I can't even properly defend myself. I'm literally weak."

"You want strength," said Lord Voldemort, "but you do not want power. To be powerful is to be feared, and revered. To be obeyed."

"No, I guess I don't care about that," Harry agreed. "But that's what you want then? For people to do as you say?"

"Among other things," said Lord Voldemort. "Beyond obedience, I want loyalty. A simple thing, is it not? And yet, so elusive."

"You had followers, right?" Harry asked, trying to get his history straight.

"Yes, I thought I did," muttered Lord Voldemort. There was that cold feeling again, that horrible disregard that Harry realised was the Dark Lord's expression of anger. But it was not anger; Harry knew anger, hot and heady, ephemeral. The Dark Lord's facsimile of it was calm like the surface of a bottomless lake. "My Death Eaters, my supposedly faithful friends. They left me to spend a decade as a wraith. Ten years, alone, abandoned, and in the end I saved myself without their aid. They have much to answer for."

Harry supposed, when he put it that way, that the Dark Lord had a right to be furious.

And it wasn't as if they'd believed him truly dead, was it? Because Harry knew for a fact that Lucius Malfoy had known for almost two years that the Dark Lord was still out there. And why had he come to Petri in the first place? To bind the Dark Lord's spirit, to _prevent him_ from rising.

Feeling a little vindictive, Harry murmured, "Lucius Malfoy was your follower, wasn't he?"

"Perhaps," said Lord Voldemort, curious again, and Harry pressed onwards.

"He came to my master's shop, asking us to find your spirit. He wasn't very happy to find out that you were still alive."

At this point, the strangest thing happened. He felt a sharp twinge behind his eyes, and then the whole memory was flashing before him, Malfoy's request, Petri's discovery, everything. And then Harry could almost feel, viscerally, how the Dark Lord demoted Lucius Malfoy from friend below even enemy, to simply… nothing in his eyes. Again, it was not anger; instead it was as if all human connection had been abruptly severed, and the man had become no more consequential than a fly.

"Thank you for showing me, Harry. I confess, I am hardly surprised. Disappointed, but not surprised. The few who were truly loyal were the ones who suffered with me. Likely they are in Azkaban, or dead," murmured Lord Voldemort.

And Harry sort of found himself feeling bad for the Dark Lord, for a tiny moment, before he remembered that the man was a mass murderer. Then he wasn't sure what to feel.

"I wonder, Harry, where your loyalties lie," said Lord Voldemort, and Harry really did not like this direction of speculation.

"I don't know," he said firmly, because it was true. "With myself, I suppose."

The Dark Lord chuckled, and Harry felt himself relax a little. "Always a good starting point. Make no mistake, Harry, you have my gratitude for your continued assistance. Lord Voldemort rewards those who help him."

Despite the fact that this third person declaration sounded objectively ridiculous, Harry felt a strange twinge of something in his chest as he heard it, almost like an electric shock had passed through his body.

"A lesson in grammatica for you, Harry. Names have power. A promise made on a name carries weight," Lord Voldemort explained.

Harry felt with strange certainty that he was welcome to ask more in this moment, whatever he wanted. This was his 'reward,' he supposed. Tutelage from the Dark Lord himself, in his self-professed best subject.

"People don't say your name," Harry said, after a pause. "They call you You-Know-Who, or the Dark Lord. That's important too, isn't it?"

"Yes. Avoidance of the name increases its power," said Lord Voldemort. "Taboos and euphemisms are one of the better-studied grammatological concepts. My name is not the clearest case, so let us consider a simpler example first. Take death. Perhaps half the time, people will use euphemisms for death, saying that someone passed away or crossed over. This lends the word enough power that it can be used in a malediction, an improvised curse that has an increased likelihood of coming to pass."

"You mean telling someone they're going to die actually makes them more likely to die?" Harry demanded.

"Yes, if it is said with serious intent," Lord Voldemort confirmed. "The effect is usually very slight."

"That's still horrifying," said Harry. "How can you defend against it?"

"Covering your ears is an adequate defence," said Lord Voldemort. "Maledictions fell out of common use centuries ago, anyway. They are hardly worth the effort when actual curses are available… I mention them only to demonstrate that fear of a particular word can give the thing itself magical significance."

"So when people don't say your name, because they're afraid, then when they do say it, it does something? What does it do?" Harry asked.

"When a wizard other than me says my name in my presence, even if they mean me disrespect, all who hear it will immediately be stricken with fear. It does amuse me when I hear my enemies effectively casting a malediction on themselves," Lord Voldemort said with a cruel smile.

Half sceptical and half morbidly curious, Harry asked, "Can I try it?"

"Go ahead," said Lord Voldemort magnanimously.

"Lord Voldemort," Harry whispered, and it _felt_ taboo, even with permission. A thrill of terror seized his heart but he couldn't for the life of him tell whether it had been natural or not.

"It appears to still work," said Lord Voldemort. Harry suddenly became very aware that this conversation, and his continued partial control over his own body, was all at the Dark Lord's leisure. His heart sped up despite himself, and he shifted slightly, pulling his knees closer to his chest.

"Yeah," he said, a little breathless and struggling to remind himself that the Dark Lord was interested in him, as opposed to interested in offing him. "It does seem like it."

"There are other advantages as well. It is possible to scry on instances of my name being spoken. I was occasionally able to locate my enemies by this method, and was in the process of systematising it, before… that night."

The fear was receding a little, and Harry managed not to think too hard on how the Dark Lord probably still considered him partially responsible for almost killing him, however unfair that was.

He opened his mouth to ask another question, but a yawn swallowed his words.

"Perhaps it is time for us both to rest," said Lord Voldemort. "I am, I admit, still weakened."

"What do you need to get better?" Harry asked.

"For now, your vitality is enough to sustain me," Lord Voldemort said. "Do not fret. I will return to Quirinus if you begin to fall ill."

But Harry did not fall ill, nor did he exhibit any symptoms besides the sleep deprivation that came with staying up too late talking to the Dark Lord, not even after two weeks of continuous possession. Despite himself, Harry was quickly becoming used to the Dark Lord's presence in his body, used to his peculiar, simultaneously dull and intense moods. The Dark Lord largely slept during the day, anyway, and during those times it was as if he wasn't there at all.

Interest sparked by the Dark Lord's high praise for arithmancy, especially grammatica, which could be used to increase the chances of things happening, Harry had checked out _Numerology and Grammatica,_ which was one of the reference texts for the Arithmancy class, and had begun reading through it in his spare, or even not so spare, time. In fact, he was about to meet Hannah, Neville, and Vince to revise for Transfiguration, and instead of getting a head start while waiting, he was reading about the properties of the number six and how one could go about making an ostensibly fair die repeatedly roll the same number without technically tampering with it. He was itching to try it out, but had no idea where he was supposed to find a die.

Then Hannah and Neville showed up, and he had to guiltily put his book away and switch it out for their Transfiguration text.

"Hey," said Harry. "What did you lot want to work on?"

"Free transfiguration," said Neville immediately, just as Hannah said, "Animate to inanimate."

"So, everything," Harry concluded, and Neville sighed glumly.

"I can't believe we're going to have to cast a transfiguration we've never done before on the exam," Hannah complained. "That's just cruel."

"In theory, all animate to inanimate uses the same process," Harry pointed out.

"In theory," Hannah mumbled. "And how are we supposed to practise, anyway?"

Harry reached into his pocket and extracted a glass jar with three spiders inside. Hannah made an "Eep!" sound as he slammed it onto the desk.

"Two of us are going to have to share, when Vince gets here," Harry said. "I couldn't find a fourth one."

Vince entered the classroom just then, sweating slightly, as if he had been running.

"Alright," he muttered, sitting down heavily on one of the small chairs, and then jumping as he saw the spiders. "What're these for?"

"Animate to inanimate," Harry said. "I was thinking let's start with something simple, like spider to stone."

He consulted with his textbook briefly on what the incantation would be to turn something to stone. Then he immobilised a spider with the body-bind curse, levitated it out of the jar, and incanted, " _Lapifors!_ " while moving his wand in the square spiral of the transfiguration "S." The spider seemed to curl in on itself, freezing into a pebble.

"See, I've never tried that specific one before but it worked," he said. "Do you all want to try? _Arachnofors!_ " he cast, reversing the transfiguration, and held out the jar to the others.

They each took a spider. Hannah turned hers into a smooth pebble on her second try, but Neville and Vince were not so lucky. Neville's broke through his body-bind and skittered off somewhere around his fourth attempt, and Vince managed to accidentally smash his when he poked it too hard with his wand.

Harry sighed, watching carefully as Hannah reversed her transfiguration. He caught the spider with _locomotor_ before it could try to escape and stuck it back in the jar.

"Okay so maybe we can do free transfiguration," Harry said. That was at least all inanimate, which meant no struggling with escaping or moving targets, though in his opinion, the transfiguration process itself was more difficult to manage. He looked around for something to transfigure.

"Here," said Hannah, producing some spare bits of yarn from her pocket.

He had just managed to turn a loop of yarn into a somewhat lumpy saucer when Hannah stood up abruptly, swivelling her head from side to side like an owl.

"What?" Harry demanded.

"Does it smell like smoke to you?" she asked, still sniffing at the air. Harry inhaled deeply and coughed, unable to tell if it was just dust or the alleged smoke.

"I think it's coming from outside," Hannah muttered, wandering over to the window. She opened it up and craned her neck to look out. "Yeah; I see smoke. Quite a bit of it."

They all stood up, transfiguration practice forgotten. Then loud, erratic footsteps reached their ears from the hallway.

A moment later, none other than Draco Malfoy burst into the room, wild strands of ordinarily slick hair drifting into his wide eyes. "You won't believe it!" he shouted, "The oaf's hut is on fire! Massively on fire!"

Goyle came lumbering in a few seconds after, just in time to break the confused silence that had descended with a mumbled, "Hey Vince. We're supposed to go back to the common room."

Draco composed himself somewhat, pressing his fringe back up, and said, affecting an official tone, "Right. 'All students are to report back to their common rooms post haste.' The prefects are rounding everyone up. I figured I'd warn you lot since you're always up here."

"Oh. Thanks," said Vince.

"You think the prefects would've missed us?" Neville asked in alarm.

"Gryffindors," said Draco with a long-suffering sigh. "Come on, Vince," he muttered, before stalking off. Vince turned to look uncertainly at Harry, who waved his hand to tell him to go. The large boy hurried after his housemates.

Neville still looked confused, and vaguely offended.

"He meant to warn us, so we could sneak off," Harry translated helpfully.

"It's too late for that," said Neville, clenching his fists. "We should have done something, don't you think? I mean, Hermione even said it wasn't safe."

Harry stared at him in incomprehension for a few moments before he realised that of course, Neville was talking about Hagrid's dragon, which was probably the cause of the fire.

"I don't think there's anything we could have done," he said. "But we should probably get out of here."

"What are you two talking about?" Hannah asked, even as she made for the door. Harry and Neville hurried after her, explaining about the dragon.

"I don't know about you, but I don't like my chances against a dragon," she said. "I'm going to my common room."

"Probably a good idea," Neville agreed, and so they split up at the stairs. Harry and Neville went up one more flight together before heading in opposite directions.

The moment Neville disappeared around the corner, the Dark Lord seized control of Harry's body and turned the other way, leaping back onto the staircase just as it disconnected from the landing and swerved downwards.

"Do you have something to do with this fire?" Harry whispered as they reached the third floor and headed towards, presumably, the forbidden corridor.

"Fortunate happenstance," said the Dark Lord, which Harry took mean that liberal grammatica had been involved.

They rounded the corner to Professor Quirrell's office, where the man was already waiting. Harry stumbled as control of his body abruptly returned to him, and his scar exploded with pain.

" _Stupefy!_ " cried Professor Quirrell, and everything went black.


	33. Accomplice

Harry’s eyes snapped open and he felt full of nervous energy, like he’d just woken from a nightmare after far too little sleep. Only, he wasn’t lying down, it was too bright, and there was a horrible buzzing in his ears. Also, Professor Quirrell’s wand was pointed right at him. Since he was conscious, rather than dead, Harry disregarded it as a threat and took a look around.

The buzzing turned out not to be an artefact of ill health, but an actual sound coming from above. He had been brought to a narrow room with a vaulted ceiling, beneath which a cloud of colourful, chattering insects flitted about constantly in a chaotic scramble around blindingly-bright spherical lanterns that hung suspended from thin chains. As several of them crashed into the side of a lantern and hung in the air for a moment, stunned, Harry saw that they were not insects, but appeared to be keys with feathery wings somehow attached to the bows and fully functional.

Harry finally looked back to Professor Quirrell. “Where are we?” he asked, and then couldn’t resist, “Did you have to knock me out? What happened to asking nicely?”

“Plausible deniability,” said a high, vaguely sibilant voice that definitely did not belong to Professor Quirrell, but nonetheless seemed to come from him. So the dark lord had returned to the back of the professor’s head. Charming. Professor Quirrell looked suddenly rather nervous for a wizard with a wand.

Harry pressed his arm discreetly against his side to feel for the solid presence of his own wand. It was still there, in his robe pocket. As casually as he could, he scooted up the wall that he had been sat up on and pushed himself to his feet. Professor Quirrell’s wand sort of followed him, but still failed to seem threatening. It was shaking a little—perhaps he was not quite recovered from his last possession yet.

“So, why exactly am I here?” Harry tried. He figured he was a hostage of some kind, but then why had he been woken up? Glancing around the chamber proper this time, he spotted a small rack in a shady corner, just beside an archway leading into a dark corridor, with three broomsticks propped up against it. He looked back up at the keys, and then across the room to a heavy iron door with a prominent lock. Well, that gave him an idea of what he was meant to do, but… “Have you tried _alohamora_?”

There was a low, shuddering hiss, and Harry realised a beat later that he’d made the Dark Lord laugh. He’d found in the past weeks that the man actually had a much more robust sense of humour than he would have expected from a mass murderer.

Professor Quirrell, for his part, did not seem at all amused, and got even paler, if that was even possible. “The door is stuck shut,” he said. “Only the right key will work.”

“Are you sure?” Harry asked. “If the door’s stuck why don’t you just make a hole in the wall next to it? How about the reductor curse to disintegrate one of the stones, and we crawl through?”

“Amusing ideas,” said the Dark Lord, “but we must act … honourably … use the intended solution.”

“Honourably,” Harry repeated sceptically.

“What?” Professor Quirrell murmured, looked very unsettled and bemused. Harry gathered from this and the fact that his voice had not come out muffled that the Dark Lord had spoken in Parseltongue earlier, leaving his servant woefully out of the loop.

“We’re just discussing strategy,” Harry said, but this didn’t seem to have the intended reassuring effect. “So you’re saying,” he continued, deciding to ignore Professor Quirrell for the moment, “that you want me to take one of those broomsticks, go up there, and find the right key? How am I supposed to know which one it is?”

He considered making some sort of jab at the Dark Lord’s athleticism, or rather lack of thereof, but thought it might be in too poor taste since he was currently bodiless and inhabiting Professor Quirrell, who was literally falling apart.

Instead of answering, Professor Quirrell looked up and began to mutter under his breath. Harry followed his gaze and noticed how, one at time, the keys froze, shuddering and twitching as if captured in an invisible grip, and then were released and zoomed off again. Finally, a large silver key remained trapped for a long time, and Professor Quirrell made a sort of jerky motion with his hands, not breaking his gaze on the key.

Right. That was the one, Harry supposed. He sprinted over to the brooms, waved his hand with an encouraging shout of “Up!” and the closest one snapped into his hand and started to take off even before he’d properly mounted it. He swung himself onto it the rest of the way as it ascended and headed straight for the suspended key.

As he did so, the other keys whirred even more loudly and began to swarm around him, obscuring his vision and bouncing irritatingly off his arms and head. He let go of the broom to shield his face.

“Bloody hell!” he yelled as they beat at him from every direction with their rainbow wings. He used his knees to force the broom towards where he thought the right key was, and soon caught a glimpse of it still struggling behind a whirling cloud of colour. He reached forward blindly with one hand, and felt the other keys whizzing by, all suddenly swerving as if repelled by his grasping attempts. All but one. As soon as his fingers closed around the trapped key’s bristly feathers, he pointed the nose of his broom downwards to escape the swarm, pulling up only at the last minute and leaping off his broom. Holding out the somewhat crumpled key, he used his other arm to wipe the sweat from his brow.

“Good work,” said Professor Quirrell a little breathlessly, as if he’d been the one getting mobbed by hundreds of flying keys, and waved his hand towards the door. “Go open it.”

Harry hoped that this really was the right key, after all that work. It struggled in his hand, and he had to scrunch up the wings and shove it into the lock, but it fit all the way, which was encouraging, and when he turned it the door clicked and swung open on its own.

“Capital,” he said, peering through the crack. It was totally dark, but as soon as he took a cautious step inside, bright light streamed down from more lanterns above, and he did a double take at what it revealed—a tiled floor made of huge square slabs of alternating black and white stone, and on either side, massive stone statues of chessmen.

“Typical Minerva,” said Professor Quirrell when he saw what was in the next room. “I suppose we’ll have to play across. Potter, you be the king, and I shall be the queen.”

As he spoke, the black king and queen left the board, stone moving fluidly and unnaturally as they stepped away, and Professor Quirrell gestured for Harry to take the king’s place. The king piece handed him his stone crown, which Harry cradled awkwardly in his arms as it was far too heavy to put on his head.

He’d never really paid much attention to wizard’s chess sets, but at this massive scale Harry couldn’t help noticing how utterly uncanny living stone could be. Unlike real flesh, it bent and warped with an impossible sort of plasticity, not rippling or bulging with the motion but remaining perfectly smooth.

Professor Quirrell played chess very quickly and without much deliberation, calling out move after move that the black pieces were more than happy to obey. Soon the sides of the room were piled high with the rubble of destroyed pieces from both sides. Harry still had not had to move from his spot, though Professor Quirrell had already zigzagged his way around the board several times, and just now returned to the black side.

Harry, who was rather bored, chanced a question. “If Professor McGonagall set up this room, and Professor Flitwick, probably, did the previous one, did you set one up as well?”

“No,” said Professor Quirrell. “I was still on sabbatical when Dumbledore orchestrated this whole farce.”

“Why is it so complicated, anyway?” Harry asked. He had caught on by now that these… obstacles were the protections for the philosopher’s stone, the things that came after the three-headed dog and before the fire that Petri had seen when scrying. The complexity didn’t make sense. Dumbledore could’ve just buried the stone in some unidentifiable hole somewhere, and even scrying wouldn’t have helped anybody find it.

Professor Quirrell didn’t answer his question, as their turn came around and he ran across the board to take the remaining white rook.

“Check mate,” he said after a few minutes, and sent a blasting curse at the white king, for good measure, reducing it to rubble and leaving its crown to clatter sadly to the floor. The surviving white pieces shuffled aside, leaving the path to the opposite door clear.

They stepped through and found what appeared to be a totally empty chamber.

“Dawlish,” Professor Quirrell muttered. “His famous mines, I expect.”

Professor Quirrell conjured a snake and sent it slithering across the room. It hardly made it five feet before a pillar of red light surged out of the ground and sent it flying, limp and somewhat singed.

“I expect flying across won’t count?” Professor Quirrell muttered. He received no response, but instead began conjuring even more snakes. “Potter, don’t just stand there,” he said, gesturing to Harry. “ _Serpensortia_ is the incantation.” He wiggled his wand in a tight “S” shape and a whole collection of snakes shot out the end.

“Er, are you sure I can—”

“Just try it,” said Professor Quirrell with some exasperation. Harry shook his arm to slide his wand into his hand, still sceptical. Conjuring an animal seemed rather advanced.

“ _Serpensortia!_ ” he cried. His arm jerked back as the end of his wand gave off a bright flash and a bang, and a small black snake flopped onto the ground. Harry gawped at it.

“It’s one of the easiest conjurations,” Professor Quirrell told him at the sight of his expression.

Upon closer inspection of the snake, an incredulous Harry was a little reassured that it wasn’t so easy that he had mastered the spell on the first try—far from it. His snake had come out looking very snaky from far away, but actually it was completely smooth, like dull metal, instead of scaly. It still slithered with lifelike alacrity into the room, where it was promptly blasted by red light like the others.

“Mark where the mines are,” said Professor Quirrell, casting _flagrate_ to draw fiery lines where the red light had come out. Harry copied him, though it took him a few tries to get the fire to appear at a distance rather than from the tip of his wand.

Soon enough they had sketched a labyrinthine path through the room, piles of conjured snakes lying around the flaming perimeter. Professor Quirrell vanished them as they followed the safe path, stepping carefully.

When they reached the other side and crossed the threshold of the next room, a wall of purple fire erupted behind them and barred their way back. Fire and a mirror, Harry remembered. Those were the last guardians of the stone. So they were nearly there.

The chamber they had entered was empty except for a long table in the middle with a row of flasks in various sizes—obviously Professor Snape’s work. The way ahead was obscured by black flame.

Professor Quirrell walked up to the table and picked up a piece of parchment, reading aloud a riddle. Apparently, the potions to make one impervious to the fire were somewhere on the table along with poison and nettle wine.

Harry frowned. “If it were me I’d just put poison in the whole lot of them,” he said. “Actually, Professor Snape seems like exactly that sort of person.”

“He does, doesn’t he?” said Professor Quirrell, smiling a little. He seemed to have gained some colour back after their successful traversing of the previous obstacles. “Fortunately for us, the protection only works if there’s a true solution.”

“How’s that?” Harry asked, perplexed.

“It’s called the Hero’s Gauntlet or Hero’s Trial. It’s completely impossible to reach the protected object, except by completing some designated trials, but the trials have to be fair. Typically three or seven, so I expect only one more after this,” Professor Quirrell explained. “Now quiet. I need to figure this out.”

Harry crept closer and peered at the parchment that Professor Quirrell had laid back on the table. After a few attempts at solving it, the positions began to swim together in his head and he he groaned.

“This one’s not poison, and it’s the same as this, so it must be wine. Therefore these two are poisons,” Professor Quirrell muttered to himself. Harry tried to follow the logic.

“Neither dwarf nor giant holds death in their insides,” he mouthed. Right. So the biggest flask, which was the second on the left, wasn’t the poison, but the second on the left was the same as the second on the right, so they had to both be wines. That meant the first and fifth flasks were poison, as they were on the left of the wines. The seventh one wasn’t poison since it had to be different from the first one, but it also wouldn’t help them move forwards, so since there were only two wines, it had to be the potion for going back.

Finally, that left the third and fourth potions, one of which was the poison and the other the one for moving forwards. Since the smallest bottle wasn’t poison, that one was the potion they were looking for.

Just as Harry came to that conclusion, Professor Quirrell picked up the smallest bottle and peered inside it.

“This one. There should be just enough for us both,” he said, and took a careful sip. He handed the remainder to Harry and walked confidently through the black flames. Since there were no screams of pain, Harry supposed they really had found the right solution, so he swallowed the rest of the potion, which made him feel icy cold, and followed Professor Quirrell through.

Right when he made it past the black fire, it occurred to him that he had been by himself for a moment, and he could have taken the backwards potion and fled. It wasn’t as if Professor Quirrell could easily get back through the fire and—

Well, that was a problem. The fire was still there and they hadn’t any potion left.

“How are we going to get out after you get the stone?” Harry asked conversationally, looking around what was clearly the final room. It was small and dim, lit only by some torches, and held only a single object of interest, a tall mirror in a golden frame that stood on clawed feet.

“I’ll figure it out,” said Professor Quirrell, which did not inspire much confidence. Harry scowled and turned back to feel around the black fire carefully. The cold sensation from the potion was already wearing off. His skin reddened after a few moments of exposure, and he had to pull his hand away before it was burned.

“Don’t look yet, you fool!” the Dark Lord hissed. Harry turned to see what was going on.

Professor Quirrell was cringing a little, but he had already looked in the mirror. Nothing awful seemed to be happening to him, and he apparently realised the same thing, and straightened out to look again.

“I see the stone,” he muttered. “I’m presenting it to my master… that’s all well and good but where is it?”

Professor Quirrell went and walked behind the mirror, but after a few evidently fruitless moments came back around.

“Harry… come take a look. Tell us what you see,” said the Dark Lord in whispery, halting English.

Not particularly trusting the mirror, Harry cast structure sight on himself.

An explosion of blue and gold assaulted his vision, and Harry determined that the mirror had had some kind of extremely complicated transfiguration applied to it, and was also enchanted, perhaps to show different things to different people.

That was unhelpful.

He gave up and cancelled the spell. Then he walked closer to peer cautiously into the mirror and whirled around immediately, only to find that of course, nobody was there besides Professor Quirrell. He turned back slowly and confirmed that he still saw people behind him.

All right, he thought, it was just like a foe glass, and it showed people who weren’t there.

But not just any people—he’d never seen these people before in his life (that he could remember) but he somehow knew exactly who they were.

“Mum,” he mouthed, staring at the woman in the mirror. She reached out and put a hand on mirror-Harry’s shoulder, and smiled. And on his other side, “Dad.”

Only the Harry in the mirror wasn’t Harry, not really. He was older, and there was some edge to his gaze that reminded Harry distinctly of Petri. He wore the invisibility cloak casually over his shoulder like a shimmering waterfall, and there was a stone in his hand, small and black, not the philosopher’s stone surely—if he recalled correctly from Nic’s book, that was red—which he was turning absently around and around.

And Harry knew, in the depths of his being, exactly what he was looking at, and felt a terrible, agonising hope kindle within him.

Did this mirror show the future? He knew mirrors could be used for divination, and necromancy in particular. But what it showed was impossible.

He didn’t feel any of the crushing disappointment that he ought to at that thought, because the hope was too powerful. True resurrection was said to be impossible, but so, supposedly, was surviving the killing curse. He’d managed the latter, even if it had been a fluke, so why shouldn’t he believe in the former?

“What do you see?” Professor Quirrell asked, rudely interrupting his reverie. Harry pulled back from the mirror, finding that he’d unconsciously stepped closer to it and even reached out a hand towards it. That was a little bit concerning.

“I see my parents,” he said vaguely. Wasn’t that ironic. Here he was, dreaming of bringing his parents back to life while he was aiding their murderer. But it wasn’t as if he really had a choice. One did not refuse the Dark Lord lightly. Getting himself killed wasn’t going to bring any of the man’s victims back.

“Your parents…” said the Dark Lord, and Harry wondered for a beat if he was actually going to try to apologise or something, as if that were at all appropriate. But no, he said instead, “Yes, they were admirable people… very brave, to face me. Your father put up a courageous fight. Your mother… your mother needn’t have died. She was trying to protect you.”

“Me?” Harry blurted, perhaps inadvisably. “You were trying to kill me? Specifically?”

There was a long pause, and Harry wondered if he was about to regret opening his stupid big mouth, but then the Dark Lord actually answered him.

“Yes,” he said. “A miscalculation. But let us set aside the past and consider the present. Look into the mirror… look again and think about the philosopher’s stone. I am sure you are aware of what that is.”

It was hardly the past Harry had been thinking of, but rather the future. Still, if it even was the future, it was some time far off, so he did as requested and thought about the philosopher’s stone instead.

What he really wanted, right this instant, was just to get out of here, and preferably alive and in one piece. For that, he needed to find the stone, which was apparently somehow inside the mirror. He took another look. There he was, his learned, older self, fiddling with that black stone. But then something very odd happened. His reflection reached behind himself, and when his hand came back the black stone was gone, replaced with a ruby red one about the size of his fist, which he slipped into his pocket with a conspiratorial wink.

Harry felt a weight settle into his robe pocket momentarily before disappearing into the depths of the extension charm. Well then.

“I think I got it,” he whispered, a little disbelieving at his luck. He had exactly zero idea of what had just happened, or how.

“What?” said Professor Quirrell.

“The stone,” said Harry. “I’ve got it. Now let’s get out of here.”

“Where is it?” Professor Quirrell demanded.

“In my pocket,” said Harry, deliberately not specifying which one. “I’ll give it to you when we’re out of here.” Perhaps he was playing a dangerous game, but he absolutely did not put it past the man (or the Dark Lord) to just leave him behind, or even to kill or memory-charm him once he had what he wanted.

“Do you take me for a fool?” said Professor Quirrell incredulously.

“He speaks the truth,” said the Dark Lord. Harry gave an internal sigh of relief at the unexpected help. That simplified things.

“But Master,” Professor Quirrell began, and then obviously thought better of contradicting the Dark Lord. “Yes, fine, let’s leave before Dumbledore returns.”

Harry watched him walk over to the black fire and examine it. The somewhat dismayed expression on his face was not at all reassuring. When he didn’t do anything but stare at it for the next minute, Harry decided to make a suggestion.

“This hero’s protection thing,” he said. “Does it mean we have to leave honourably too? Or can we go ahead and blast a hole in the wall?”

Professor Quirrell put his face in his hands.

“Again, Harry proves himself a better servant than you, Quirinus,” said the Dark Lord. “A mere child. Do as he says.”

“Yes Master,” said Quirrell miserably. He drew his wand and shot a bolt of bright red light at the wall adjacent to the blocked archway, which exploded and left a nice meter-tall hole. The black fire, thankfully, did not spread, and they scrambled through the opening. Since there was plenty of the potion to pass through the purple flames, they each took a sip of that and went through properly.

Taking Harry’s hand, Professor Quirrell jumped into the air and stayed there, before flying them across the room and thereby avoiding all the traps on the floor. In the next room, the chess set seemed to have rebuilt itself, but the pieces did nothing to bar them from going back. As they crossed beneath the colourful swarm of flying keys into a dark corridor, Professor Quirrell raised his wand above his head and shot out a huge gout of blue flame, banishing the gloom. To Harry’s astonishment, the ceiling began to churn and writhe, and the sinuous bodies of a thousand snakes recoiled from the fire sizzling at the edges. No—at second glance, he saw that he had been mistaken, and it was instead a mass of thick, meaty vines that parted above them.

Professor Quirrell conjured a small harp, and his wand went out, leaving them in pitch darkness. The vines rustled threateningly above them.

“Potter,” Professor Quirrell began, but Harry had withdrawn his wand and cast _incendio_ already, and bluebell flame dribbled out like water from a faucet. The encroaching vines sprang back, and the harp ascended until it passed through a square of light in the distance. A trap door.

Then Professor Quirrell held out his hand again, and Harry braced himself for the strange feeling of weightlessness that came with this mode of flight. They rose up, and as they got higher Harry could hear the soft, resonant melody of the harp playing above.

The three-headed dog! It had to be in the room above. He tensed, but there wasn’t exactly anywhere to run, held aloft by Professor Quirrell as he was. They emerged from the trap door, and Harry breathed out a sigh of relief at the sight of the gigantic dog slumped to the side, fast asleep. They landed, and Professor Quirrell hurried him through the door.

Headmaster Dumbledore was waiting for them in the third floor corridor, Professors Snape and McGonagall in place behind him. His wand was out, and his eyes were hard.

“Tom,” he said. Harry blinked, wondering who Tom was supposed to be. “Release the boy.”

“Release the boy,” echoed the Dark Lord a little mockingly, and Professor Quirrell let go of Harry’s wrist, as if burned. And then, “Give me the stone.” This last part was in Parseltongue, Harry thought, but nevertheless Dumbledore reacted instantly, his wand whirling through the air.

“ _Accio stone!”_

The sheer force of his summoning charm dragged Harry forward a few paces, at least until the stone extricated itself from his pocket and shot towards Dumbledore’s outstretched hand.

“ _Accio!_ ” Professor Quirrell cast back, but it seemed to have no effect whatsoever.

“Harry, to me,” Professor Dumbledore said urgently, but it was too late—shadow travelled as quickly as light.

Harry felt barely a moment of suffocating pain before he emerged from the grasping coils of the Dark Lord’s soul and found himself staring out through scarlet eyes.

“Give me the stone, Dumbledore,” he said. Then he raised his wand with incredible alacrity and frigid, unrelenting apathy, sketching a vicious zigzag: “ _Avada Kedavra!_ ” Sickly green light flashed down the corridor.

Dumbledore had already flicked his wand by the first syllable, materialising a pillar of stone in the killing curse’s path, which cracked as it deflected the spell into the ceiling. He returned fire with the stunning spell, joined by the other professors, but the Dark Lord had no trouble jerking Harry’s body out of the way of the first and blocking the other two with a silent shield charm.

“Tsk, tsk,” the Dark Lord murmured. “Severus. Just where do your loyalties lie?”

He parried Professor McGonagall’s disarming charm and incinerated a flock of conjured birds from Professor Dumbledore with a lazy slash of his wand.

“Don’t answer that,” he added, when Professor Snape froze with indecision.

“Harry, my boy, you must fight him,” Professor Dumbledore entreated as spell after spell of his was countered with ease by the Dark Lord. The professors were sorely handicapped, Harry realised, by their unwillingness to cast anything truly harmful at him, while the Dark Lord replied with a quick succession of Unforgivables, and though none met their mark, they kept Professor Dumbledore on the defensive.

“It’s no use!” Harry yelled. It was far too late for him to be considering rejecting the Dark Lord from his body. That window of opportunity had passed after the first ten seconds of the very first possession.

But he still had control of his body, he thought. What if he just gave it a conflicting order, hesitated slightly, right into the path of a stunning spell? Then...

Then the Dark Lord would know exactly what he had done, and would probably murder him at the next opportunity. A small problem with that plan.

A shield charm which was not the Dark Lord’s own sprang up around them suddenly, and Harry belatedly realised that Professor Quirrell had recovered from the abrupt separation and was joining the duel.

The Dark Lord lowered Harry’s wand and twirled it in his fingers as a shower of spells fell ineffectually against the shield.

“You will give me the stone, Dumbledore,” he said, “or your... _vanquisher_ ,” he put emphasis on this strange word, “will find himself quite vanquished.”

And then he turned Harry’s wand on himself, and cast, of all things, a stinging hex.

“Ouch,” he said, grinning, and Harry felt a stinging line whip across his jaw.

Dumbledore turned very pale and, to Harry’s infinite surprise, lowered his wand.

“Release the boy, Tom,” said Dumbledore gravely, but there was no hiding the raw fear in his eyes. Fear of what, Harry couldn’t fathom. Harry, for his part, was relieved that the man wasn’t going to push the Dark Lord into actualising his threat.

“The stone,” said the Dark Lord with waning patience.

Dumbledore produced the stone.

“Albus!” Professor McGonagall exclaimed, but he silenced her with a grave shake of his head.

“Would you be so kind as to escort me to the gate, Professor?” asked the Dark Lord. “Leave your... friends behind.”

And Dumbledore gestured for the other professors to stay as he walked Harry and Professor Quirrell through Hogwarts, down three still, unchanging staircases, and out the double doors. They encountered no one, not even a ghost.

Harry could not hold back a gasp at the sight of the grounds. They were utterly ravaged, black and grey instead of green, and thick, cloying ash hung in the air, threatening to pitch him into a coughing fit.

The Dark Lord cast some sort of charm that put an almost visible bubble of clear air around his head, and they breathed more easily. Dumbledore did the same.

“See what your leniency has earned you?” the Dark Lord commented cryptically.

“It has earned me lifelong friends, while you have only flatterers and sworn enemies,” Dumbledore said. Harry shuddered as he peered into the professor’s cold eyes, and a needle of ice seemed to pierce his chest.

They said nothing more, walking only in silence that should have been tense, but which the Dark Lord bore with such calmness that Harry could not help sinking into it, lulled into a stupor by the rhythmic crunching of gravel and ruined grass beneath their feet.

They reached the towering iron gates, and the Dark Lord took one step outside with Quirrell before he turned on his heel and held Harry’s hand out for the stone.

“Release him first,” said Dumbledore.

“As you wish,” said the Dark Lord, and Harry toppled backwards as his whole body went suddenly slack, his mind failing to pick up control in time. Quirrell screamed as the Dark Lord’s wraith streamed into him, but recovered quickly enough to catch Harry and point his wand at him.

“Now give me the stone,” said the Dark Lord from inside Quirrell’s turban. “Or is your word as worthless as ever?”

When Dumbledore failed to move for a few seconds, Quirrell dug his wand into the back of Harry’s neck.

“Having second thoughts, old man? So am I. Keep the stone. I’ll take Harry instead,” said the Dark Lord.

 _He’s bluffing_ , Harry thought.

Dumbledore approached at that, but Quirrell’s wand hand shot up in warning.

“Toss it over,” he said, and let go of Harry, taking one step back.

Dumbledore threw the stone, making a sharp gesture with his other hand. Harry ran, almost pitching forward in his haste, and whirled around as soon as he made it past the halfway point between Dumbledore and the Dark Lord.

Professor Quirrell had reached out with his hand, and the stone was firmly in his grip. Harry glanced to Dumbledore, half hoping that the man had some kind of ingenious plan in mind, but when he looked back he saw only the tail end of Quirrell’s robes as he was sucked away by disapparition.

“He’s gone?” said Harry.

“I do believe so,” Dumbledore confirmed. There was the crunching of gravel, and then a warm, rough hand landed on Harry’s shoulder.

Perhaps it had been intended as a comforting gesture, but Harry’s heart shot up into his throat. He reeled, tasting bile in the back of his mouth as all the anxiety that the Dark Lord’s possession had somehow kept at bay returned in an instant, with interest. He flinched away.

He heard a deep sigh behind him. “You must be quite exhausted after your ordeal, my boy. Let’s get you up to the hospital wing,” Professor Dumbledore said.

“I’m fine,” Harry said reflexively. “He didn’t do anything, er, he didn’t really hurt me.”

“All the same, I insist that you allow Madam Pomfrey to have a look at you,” Professor Dumbledore said, gesturing for him to return up the path to the castle. “Possession is not a matter to be taken lightly.”

“Sorry,” Harry muttered, staring at the gravel. “I couldn’t resist him.”

“My boy, you have nothing to apologise for,” Professor Dumbledore told him firmly. “Older and wiser wizards have found themselves powerless before Lord Voldemort. You are the one who deserves an apology. Hogwarts has failed to keep you safe.”

“You didn’t know,” Harry said, but then he remembered Petri’s casual certainty that Professor Dumbledore had in fact been aware of the Dark Lord in his school. “You _didn’t_ know, did you? That the, that Lord Voldemort was possessing Professor Quirrell? Or me?”

He stared up at the Headmaster’s blue eyes, remembered about the mind reading, and then decided that he did not care and maintained eye-contact. But then Dumbledore actually closed his eyes.

“I suspected Quirinus,” he finally said, “but I had no proof. I never imagined that Voldemort would stoop to possessing a child.”

Harry wondered for a confused moment whether Professor Dumbledore was trying to apply ethical assumptions to a mass murderer who had once attempted to kill a baby, but then realised that he was talking about power—he had not expected the Dark Lord to accept such limitations.

“He could cast the killing curse even with my magic,” Harry pointed out. “He mentioned using some sort of magic gathering technique.”

“He spoke to you?” Professor Dumbledore asked sharply, and Harry wondered if he perhaps should have kept that information to himself. Well, it was too late. He might as well go all the way and get his questions answered.

“Er, yeah. And earlier he said something to me without meaning to, I think. He said that he tried to kill me, specifically, when I was a baby. Not my parents—me. And that it was a miscalculation. Do you have any idea why, sir?”

Professor Dumbledore suddenly looked away, staring up into the sky. “The only baby Voldemort ever tried to kill was Harry Potter.”

The _fidelius_ charm, of course.

He looked back, and by the tightening of all the lines on his face and the lack of twinkle in his eye, Harry gathered that he did in fact know something.

“I do not wish to lie to you, my boy, so I must ask you to understand that this is something I cannot tell you about yet,” Professor Dumbledore said at last.

Harry wanted to be indignant, but the grammatological concepts that the Dark Lord had shown him before gave him pause. The mere act of telling someone something could irreparably change the course of the future. Carefully, he asked, “Cannot, or should not?”

“Should not, at my best estimation,” Dumbledore conceded, which confirmed Harry’s suspicions that there was an arithmantic reason behind his reticence. That was a whole new level of horrifying, which served well to dampen his curiosity.

“Okay,” Harry said. “Noted. Don’t try to find out why the Dark Lord has it in for me. Or had. He didn’t really seem interested in finishing the job, anyway. That’s good, right? Or is it bad? Or is that a dangerous question too?”

He knew he was rambling, and that his voice was getting higher and higher, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.

Professor Dumbledore sidestepped this topic and said instead, “Voldemort has always acted for his own gain, first and foremost.”

“Well that worked out for him,” Harry muttered. “He’s got the philosopher’s stone.”

“There is yet hope that he will not be able to use it,” said Professor Dumbledore calmly, turning back to Harry. “Brewing the elixir of life is not trivial, and the stone itself can prove hazardous to the user.”

“He’s a genius,” Harry said, sceptical of this hope.

Professor Dumbledore shook his head. “There are secrets to the stone that cannot be discovered through reason alone.”

The Dark Lord also still had Nic’s book, Harry remembered, and he was willing to bet that some of those unreasonable secrets were alluded to in there. They were all doomed, and it was halfway his fault.

Then again, he wondered, “Sir, how did I get the stone out of that mirror? I still don’t understand.”

Professor Dumbledore sighed. “I may have outsmarted myself in this case. Only someone who wanted to get the stone, but did not want to use it, would have been able to retrieve it.”

“Oh. And the mirror itself, is that, is what it shows…”

“The mirror shows neither truth nor reality, only the deepest and most desperate desire of our hearts. I am sorry you had to encounter it,” said Professor Dumbledore, looking away.

Harry was not sorry. He had buried that desire until that moment, written it off as foolish and impossible. Perhaps it was, but that did not mean that he should give it up without even trying. He knew that all sorts of temporary resurrections were based in the darkest magic, and that even these could not restore true will. But why should he have to use those same methods? If they did not work, did that not suggest that they were wrong? There was a universe of things he did not yet know, and until he knew for a fact that it would be impossible, he could not relinquish hope.

The formidable castle doors loomed above them, jewel-encrusted metalwork gleaming harshly in the afternoon sunlight. Professor Dumbledore lifted his hand negligently, and the doors drew themselves open without a sound. The shadow of the entrance hall blinded them for a moment, but then they walked on, traversing the castle in grave silence.

“Albus!” Madam Pomfrey greeted as they finally stepped into the stale, peculiarly odourless environment of the hospital wing. “Another one from the fire? Bring them over.” She bustled up to them, the sleeves of her pale green robes rolled up and wand held loosely in hand.

Professor Dumbledore shook his head every so slightly. “Not the fire, Poppy, I’m afraid. Could we take this to your office?”

Madam Pomfrey paused and peered first at Professor Dumbledore, then at Harry with concern, before nodding curtly. “Go ahead. I shall be right with you.”

Professor Dumbledore ushered Harry towards the left side of the room, through a low, curtained archway that led into an alcove with a long wooden table opposite three low stools. He gestured for Harry to sit, but did not take a seat himself.

They were joined by Madam Pomfrey about a minute later. She leaned back against the edge of the table, wand still in hand.

“Well? What’s the matter then?” she asked.

Professor Dumbledore waved his wand at the curtain in a compact but absurdly complex motion, never taking his eyes off Madam Pomfrey. Then he said, “This student was a victim of possession. Could you take a look?”

“Possession?” Madam Pomfrey repeated. “By what? For how long?”

“An hour at least, by Voldemort,” said Professor Dumbledore, and Madam Pomfrey flinched visibly. Harry frowned. The headmaster had said the Dark Lord’s name multiple times today, but Harry had not felt even a twinge of the terror that came from saying it in the man’s presence. That confirmed that there really was some sort of magical effect. And despite his proven willingness to use the name, Harry realised that Professor Dumbledore had not spoken it even once in front of the Dark Lord himself, preferring instead to call him… ‘Tom.’ Harry wondered if that was the Dark Lord’s actual, original name. It seemed so mundane.

Professor Dumbledore looked to Harry questioningly, and before he could really think it through, Harry nodded, and thus immediately landed himself in the awkward position of wondering whether he should bring up the previous two weeks of possession also. The window during which the omission could be taken for an accident rather than a lie slipped away quickly, and finally he was forced to remain silent as Madam Pomfrey drew near, wand already in motion.

She paused with its tip level with his eyebrows, frowning. “When was the last time you had blood?” she asked.

Harry stared at her in incomprehension for a long moment, finally understood what she was asking, and then fell into even deeper confusion. Unable to make heads or tails of what was going on, he finally just answered her question.

“Er, never. I don’t need it,” he said.

Madam Pomfrey tutted under her breath, and then flicked her wand in the telltale motion of the summoning charm.

Harry finally concluded that his eyes must still be red, however little sense that made. As surreptitiously as he could, he pushed his glasses a little to the side so that he could peer over the rims. He didn’t know what he expected, but was somewhat reassured, if bewildered, to see that his uncorrected vision was as blurry as ever without the Dark Lord’s aid.

The curtain in the archway billowed, and then gave way to a small object which zoomed into Madam Pomfrey’s outstretched hand. It was a crystal phial, clearly filled with blood, which would not be out of place on the shelf in Petri’s necromancy workshop. She drew the stopper out with her thumb and held the phial out to Harry.

“Bottoms up,” she said.

“Er,” he muttered, “I don’t think—”

“Young man, you are hardly the first student I’ve treated for the vampire’s curse, nor the first to be in denial about it. Trust me. It will be better for everybody if you learn to manage the symptoms rather than run away from them,” Madam Pomfrey admonished. Harry instinctively wanted to protest that he wasn’t in denial about anything, because there was nothing to deny, but he clamped down on the urge, knowing that it would only lead either to disbelief or awkward questions.

He took the phial and peered into its murky depths, swallowing thickly. This was his punishment for telling lies, he supposed—being believed a little too well. He brought the thin neck of the bottle to his lips and tipped it back, taking a hesitant sip.

It wasn’t all that bad. Actually, the metallic, salty tang was almost satisfying, like nostalgia, soothing some hollow part of him that felt like homesickness for a place he had never known. He angled the phial up higher, savouring the smooth flow across his tongue and licking the edges in disappointment when it ran dry.

Then what he had just done hit him, and he lowered the phial with some shock. A glance at Madam Pomfrey told him she was smug, almost smirking. Bewilderment and horror jockeyed for first place in the pit of his stomach, before he finally settled on feeling supremely foolish. Had he been lying to _himself_ all year? Had _Petri_ lied to him? Why? How was this possible?

“Now that that’s out of the way,” said Madam Pomfrey, summoning the empty phial from his slack fingers, “How are you feeling? Any headache, nausea? General malaise?”

Harry took a moment to assess himself, forcing his whirling thoughts to the back of his mind, and decided that he felt physically great. “No, nothing like that,” he said.

Madam Pomfrey waved her wand, passing it up and down his body like a baton, and finally said, “Well, you aren’t injured or ill, and there doesn’t seem to be any lingering magic from possession. If you begin to feel inexplicably tired and unable to focus, that’s a sign that you should drink blood. A few ounces will do, and human blood only, if you do not wish to make yourself very sick. Come see me when you experience those symptoms.”

Her tone brooked no argument, so Harry nodded jerkily, and then glanced over to the headmaster, who was twiddling his thumbs in the corner, looking all the world like he was paying absolutely no attention to the conversation. But when Madam Pomfrey turned to him, he sharpened up instantly, letting his hands fall to his sides.

“Albus, you said… You-Know-Who. Do you really mean that he was here?” she asked.

“I’m afraid so,” Professor Dumbledore confirmed. “He was possessing Quirinus, likely all year long. You saw for yourself what it did to him.”

Madam Pomfrey gasped, and then glanced back at Harry. “Small mercies, then that he wasn’t exposed to it for long.”

“Yes, small mercies, indeed,” Professor Dumbledore agreed solemnly. “Thank you, Poppy. Harry, you’d best return to your common room. I’m sure your friends are worried about you.”

Harry nodded at this dismissal, thanked the headmaster and Madam Pomfrey, and ducked past the curtain. Glancing around the hospital wing, he saw several students lying on beds, though he could not make out their identities. Madam Pomfrey had mentioned that people had got hurt in the fire, but he supposed the faculty must have been able to contain it eventually.

The details of the entire affair were plastered on the front page of the next morning’s _Daily Prophet_ , with an accompanying black-and-white photograph of a great vortex of fire. Hagrid’s face appeared several lines later, set into a grimace that made him look like a hairy savage.

“HOGWARTS CONFLAGRATION RESULT OF ILLICIT DRAGON BREEDING,” read the enormous headline.

Nobody had been seriously hurt, though the head girl and two prefects had passed out from inhaling too much smoke. Dragon fire was apparently not easily put out, and it had taken the combined strength of all the professors and a contingent of aurors to sink it into the ground. The dragon itself had been captured and was awaiting transport to a reserve, and Hagrid had been arrested.

There was no mention of Professor Quirrell or the philosopher’s stone. No announcement had been made either about who was going to administer the Defence exam. Harry wasn’t sure if any of the other students had even noticed his absence at the head table.

“This is mad brilliant,” said Terry, folding up the front page of the _Prophet_. “My brother’ll be so jealous.”

“Jealous?” Lisa demanded.

“You know, that we got to see a dragon,” Terry said.

“You mean that you got to hide in your dormitory while the professors dealt with the dragon,” she corrected. “That’s completely lame.”

“I can’t believe the groundskeeper was just keeping a class XXXXX creature in his hut. That’s horrible,” Morag said. “What if it had eaten a student?”

Harry doubted that the dog-sized baby dragon could have managed to actually eat a person, but Morag did have a point. He wondered a little regretfully if maybe they should have told someone about Hagrid’s illegal pet after all, before it came to this.

Draco Malfoy, always eager to spread gossip, leaned over from the Slytherin table and told them, “My father says that this isn’t the first time that oaf has done something like this. He was actually expelled from Hogwarts for keeping an acromantula that killed another student. I hope they give him the kiss.”

That was a little extreme, Harry thought, especially coming from Draco, whose father probably also deserved the kiss by the same metrics. Sue and Morag nodded along, however. Lisa shrugged and said, “He’ll probably get a fine and a couple years in Azkaban, I wager.”

Nobody knew enough to contradict her, and talk moved on to exams, which were imminent.

“I’m going to fail Charms,” Terry declared.

“I don’t understand how you’re good at Transfiguration but not Charms,” said Lisa, shaking her head.

“They’re totally different!” Terry protested unwisely. Lisa immediately began to expound upon the blurry line between the two subjects, and how convention was the only reason that the mending charm was not considered a transfiguration.

It was all so mundane. Harry felt as if he were an outsider looking in, despite the fact that he was sitting right in the middle of the pack of first years and by no means socially excluded. The problem was that there wasn’t anybody he could talk to about his real concerns, which were as far away from exams as one could get. Even Professor Dumbledore didn’t know the true extent of his interaction with the Dark Lord.

And what did that make him? He had been complicit, hadn’t he? He had intentionally been complicit, even, in following Petri’s advice. The Dark Lord had not even had to resort to any explicit threats.

Nonetheless, Harry could not imagine doing anything differently and achieving a better outcome. Perhaps if he had fought off the first round of possession, things would be different, but he wasn’t sure if that was even a possible scenario. He had been blindsided, and his body had been compatible with the Dark Lord’s spirit. That was all there was to it, wasn’t it? After the possession, all that fighting would have earned him was unconsciousness while the Dark Lord traipsed about in full control.

“You look worried, mate,” Anthony told him, startling him from his reverie. “I thought you were done studying?”

“Well, not done, but I feel ready,” Harry confirmed, trying to smile. He was afraid it had come out as a grimace instead. “It’s nothing.”

“Imagine being ready for exams,” Terry said with a long-suffering sigh, waving his arm wildly at Harry. “This bloke’s going to be all by himself in lessons next year.”

“Do they really make you repeat a year if you fail?” Oliver asked, looking a little green.

“I’ve never heard of anybody failing first year,” Anthony assured him.

And he was right. Everybody passed, even Goyle. Vince later confessed that, though he had left the written portions of each exam blank on account of his illiteracy, he had actually done well enough on his practicals to scrape an Acceptable in every subject except for History of Magic, which of course had been entirely written. Harry privately suspected that the other boy’s performance in Potions had also been bolstered by a liberal amount of house favouritism from Professor Snape.

Harry, for his part, found the exams surprisingly easy compared to everything he had practised while revising with Hannah, Neville, and Vince, with only Transfiguration providing a challenge. There, as promised, they had to demonstrate an animate to inanimate transfiguration that they had not cast before, which was mouse to snuffbox. The trick, which he caught on to easily after an entire year’s practice searching for semantic similarities, was to relate mice to snuffling to snuffboxes. Professor McGonagall had deducted some points for his furry snuffbox, but he had managed an Exceeds Expectations anyway, which exceeded his expectations.

On the last day of term, just before breakfast, the names of the top seven students in each subject were posted on the bulletin board outside of the Great Hall, right next to the house point counters, where Slytherin’s cool emeralds gleamed with the glory of the House Cup. Half the school was huddled around, fighting to get a look at the top marks.

“Terry, you absolute twit,” Lisa yelled. “You’re on all these, Mr Oh-No-I’m-Gonna-Fail-Everything.”

“What? No way!” said Terry, elbowing some Hufflepuffs out of the way to get to the front. Harry followed in his wake, successfully getting close enough to read the lists.

Hermione Granger had finished at the top of every subject except Charms, where even her well-known pedantry when it came to essay-writing apparently could not match Harry’s detailed understanding, and Potions, where Professor Snape would probably never suffer a Gryffindor to take the top spot. The honour there went to Stephen and Draco, as first and second, respectively.

Despite Ravenclaw’s reputation as the house of bookworms, there were not noticeably more Ravenclaws than students of other houses in the top seven. Terry and Lisa were the only ones who showed up prominently across the board. Harry saw his own name in Charms and Defence only. He actually thought he had done very well in Defence, perhaps better than Hermione, but the exam had been administered by Professor Snape, who had spent half the practical distracted by his terminal inability to recognise Harry.

He searched for the names of his other friends. Neville was on the Herbology list, right after Hermione, and Hannah had made it to fifth in Charms.

Curiosity satisfied, he let himself be pushed to the side and towards the massive doors at the front of the entrance hall, where Filch was once again gleefully informing passing students that they would be prohibited from doing magic outside of Hogwarts all summer. He wondered if he should search for his friends, but gave it up as a bad job, with so many people milling about. They had said their goodbyes the previous evening at the leaving feast, anyway. Perhaps they would encounter each other on the train.

He hurried past Filch, trunk clunking along behind him, and sprinted across the courtyard, taking a great leap down the steps and onto the path to Hogsmeade where dozens of carriages waited under the dreary cover of grey clouds. The thestrals whickered softly at Harry as he approached, and he gave the nearest one a cautious pat on its snout. Its long tongue darted out and licked a strangely dry trail up the side of his hand. Harry had the feeling that it was smiling at him, from the twinkle in the depths of its dark eye, and he smiled back, finding himself looking forward to going home.


	34. Family

Harry glanced all around the platform, uncertain whether he ought to be looking for Silviu or Petri. In the end, a tap on his shoulder startled him, and he whirled around, searching fruitlessly for a minute before he spotted Petri on the far end, gloved hand and wand outstretched. Harry sighed. Of course there was a spell to poke someone at a distance.

“Er, hi,” Harry said, ducking around a boisterously chattering family and narrowly avoiding an elbow to the head.

“Welcome back, Harry,” said Petri with more poise. “We shall be taking the floo to Sixty-six Knockturn. Come along now.”

There was a queue before the row of fireplaces at the back of the platform, and they stopped behind a couple who were accompanied by an older Slytherin girl.

“I read about the fire in the newspaper,” Petri said, in German, for some reason. “Was Dumbledore really harbouring an illegal dragon?”

“Well it was er, one of the staff, not Dumbledore,” Harry clarified.

“He must have known,” Petri insisted.

“Why? He’s not all-knowing. He told me he didn’t know about the Dark Lord and Professor Quirrell either. I don’t think he was lying,” Harry said.

“You would never know if he was lying,” Petri told him with a snort.

They arrived at the front of the queue, and he took a handful of floo powder out of his pocket, depositing some into Harry’s open palm. Harry tossed it into the crackling grate and stepped into the ensuing tongue of green flame with a deliberately enunciated, “Sixty-six Knockturn Alley,” keeping a firm grip on his trunk. Then all the wind was knocked out of him, like someone had rolled him into a carpet and then unrolled him down the stairs. Countless fireplaces whooshed past, destroying his sense of balance, and finally he was spat out at the end of the flickering green tunnel to stumble into the musty, dank shack that passed for the graveyard’s floo station. A pair of disgruntled owls hooted reproachfully at his soot-covered form.

Petri, somehow entirely composed and soot-free, arrived a second after, stalked past him, and pushed open the rickety door, blinding them both with the afternoon light. Harry struggled to catch up, leaning on his trunk for balance.

“I’ll never get used to the floo,” he muttered.

“It takes practice,” Petri allowed. “Speaking of practice, have you practised your animation?” And as if it were an afterthought, he added, “How were your marks?”

“Er, good. I got the top spot in Charms,” Harry said, and somehow under Petri’s stoic gaze it seemed like an expectation, rather than an accomplishment. “I’ve got animating mice down, but I couldn’t really find something, er, bigger to practise on.”

Petri nodded distractedly as they picked their way through the tall grass between the gravestones. “We can get some rabbits. Or perhaps you can move right to a muggle.”

It occurred to Harry how unfair it was that he had literally just got off the train from school, and here Petri was, already talking about more spell practice. But the image in the mirror haunted him—his parents, alive and proud, because of him. Parlour tricks with mice weren’t going to cut it.

So he said, “Tonight?”

Even Petri seemed to think this a little ridiculous, however, because he stopped and turned to give Harry a raised eyebrow. “Our landlord wants to meet with you tonight,” he said.

Harry stiffened, suddenly remembering about the vampire business.

“I drank blood,” he blurted out, before he could put all the events littering his mind in the proper order. He hadn’t even mentioned the Dark Lord’s possession yet, had he? Shaking his head, he tried to clarify, “and, er, I liked it. And the matron, she said I had the vampire curse at a late stage, but I thought I’m not supposed to be changing because I’m not dead.”

Petri bore this rapid deluge with grace, and waited a beat after Harry finished before he said, “I miscalculated,” which was the last thing Harry wanted to hear. He held his panicked tongue and waited for Petri to continue. “Do you remember the reconstruction where you died?”

“Yeah,” Harry confirmed. How could he forget _that_? He tried not to leap ahead to wild conclusions.

“It likely accelerated the curse,” Petri said.

“So I’m going to turn into a vampire?” Harry demanded, voice jumping up an octave. Petri sighed and shook his head.

“If you do not die _again_ , it should not progress any further,” he said, turning to continue walking. “And unless you stay dead for an entire night or more, no.I do not believe you will turn into a vampire.”

“But does it matter?” Harry asked. “I’m basically halfway a vampire, aren’t I? I drank blood!”

“It matters because your fate remains open,” Petri insisted. “As long as you remain fundamentally a wizard, you will have the power to choose your destiny.”

He descended into their coffin house, and Harry scrambled to follow, pulling the trap door shut behind him.

“The Dark Lord said that muggles don’t even have destinies. What’s the difference between choosing one and not having one?” he asked. Petri froze at the bottom of the stairs.

“The Dark Lord spoke to you?” he demanded.

“The Dark Lord possessed me for a while,” Harry admitted. “He told me some things about arithmancy.”

“How long is ‘a while?’” Petri demanded.

“Er, around two weeks,” said Harry.

“Two weeks,” Petri repeated as if dumbfounded, “and Dumbledore…”

“He doesn’t know. I didn’t tell him,” Harry said.

Petri digested this information in silence for a few moments, and then sat down at the table with a sigh, touching his hand to his temple.

“I suppose I should count myself lucky that you are telling _me_ all this,” he said. “And did the Dark Lord give a reason why he decided to possess you in particular?”

“Er, he said he needed to regain his strength. And Professor Quirrell wasn’t doing so well. He was possessing him before,” Harry said.

“But this professor of yours is still alive?” Petri asked. Harry nodded. “He cannot have been too badly off then. Think, boy! A conjured spirit can temporarily occupy even a dead body, so your professor could easily have remained possessed until he died, and even for a short time afterwards.”

Harry frowned at the gruesome thought.

Petri forged ahead. “The Dark Lord wanted something from you, specifically. But why only two weeks? Where is he now? Still at Hogwarts?”

“No. I dunno where,” said Harry. “He escaped, er, with the philosopher’s stone.”

“He what?” Petri demanded, turning white. His hand dropped to the table with a dull thud and Harry got the sense that his mind was suddenly somewhere else. He took the opportunity to drag his trunk to his bedside and sit down on his duvet instead.

At length, Petri’s lined face regained some colour, and he exhaled deeply. “We don’t have much time then,” he said, peering at Harry with curiously dull eyes. “We need to prepare for the Dark Lord’s return.”

“What do you mean, prepare?” Harry asked. Was there some standard checklist of things to do before the Dark Lord resurrected himself?

“You asked before what it means to choose your fate,” Petri said. “As wizards, we have the power to know what the future may hold. Not just to guess, but to know, if conditionally. Because of that, by choosing present conditions, we are effectively choosing future outcomes. But you must understand that using that power means sacrificing another sort of power, the power of ignorance. The future is open, there are infinite possibilities—until we try to look. When we look, when we grasp at those infinities, only a finite handful remain.”

Harry blinked. That actually made—well, a frightening amount of sense. “So you mean, you already, er, looked at your future then? So that means you can pick the best one, right?”

Petri snorted, still frowning. “Sometimes, one must do something, even knowing that it will lead to a worse outcome.”

Harry tried to wrap his head around this strange statement, but he kept coming back around to the thought that a worse outcome couldn’t possibly actually be worse, if it was the one that he would pick.

“I don’t understand,” he finally said.

“I hope you never need to,” said Petri, and Harry noticed for perhaps the first time that he was an old man. Though there was no sign of frailty or uncertainty in him, he spoke with an undeniable world-weariness that Harry only ever remembered hearing from Professor Dumbledore.

“Okay,” said Harry. “So you picked a, er, worse outcome. What exactly is that, then?”

“You do not want to know,” Petri told him without irony. “You will not be able to prevent it, so it is better that you find out when it happens.”

“It,” Harry said with a frown. “It’s some specific bad thing that’s going to happen, then?”

Petri glared, and Harry knew he wouldn’t get any further with this line of questioning. Instead, he asked, “So do I have to do anything then, to ‘prepare?’”

“That depends. I suppose you can decide if you want to see and pick the ‘best’ outcome, as you said, or if you would rather not know,” Petri said.

Normally, Harry knew he would jump for the ‘knowing’ option. Now he wasn’t so sure. Knowing, he realized, was irreversible.

Or was it?

“Er, if I don’t like it, can I, you know, get memory charmed?” Harry asked, hoping he didn’t sound like a complete fool.

Petri drew his eyebrows together. “That is an interesting question,” he muttered. “I do not know if it’s been tested. Or how one would even go about testing it. How can you confirm whether something happened if you don’t remember the information? Perhaps you could write it down and hide it…”

“I want to try seeing,” said Harry, half certain that he was going to regret saying it immediately. Of course, he didn’t actually regret it—he still wasn’t sure what to feel. It was something between excitement and nausea.

“It might not even work,” Petri warned him. “You have a talent for divination, but there is significant technique to this method as well.”

Harry shrugged.

“Tomorrow then,” said Petri. “As I mentioned before, you have a meeting with our landlord tonight.”

He did not elaborate, so Harry asked, “What kind of meeting?”

Petri wrinkled his nose. “I believe some kind of gathering with his entire company. You’ll have to humour him, since he believes that you are a part of it. Better have some dinner before you go. He’s expecting you at sunset.”

He gestured to the table, where Harry had to do a double take. What he had at first dismissed as the usual pile of books and papers included something that very much didn’t belong. Underneath a translucent, hemispherical dome was a plate laden with a piece of bread, a slice of ham, and a hunk of cheese. The dome vanished when Petri waved his wand.

Harry opened his mouth and then closed it, uncertain if he should question this turn of fortune. Memory of the lavish leaving feast was still fresh in his mind, dampening the appeal somewhat, but even a simple meal was miles better than the chalk-flavoured nutritive potion he had been expecting.

Suspicion won out. “Did we run out of potion or something?” he asked.

Petri smiled with eye-crinkling sincerity, which was never a good sign.

“Rosenkol learned to… cook is perhaps the wrong word. Prepare food,” he explained. Harry gaped.

“Rosenkol? Really?” he muttered. It seemed almost less plausible than if Petri had claimed that he himself had produced it.

“Rosenkol, show him,” said Petri. Instantly and without a sound, Rosenkol stepped out of the corner and into the light. Harry blinked rapidly. Had the elf been there the whole time? Rosenkol raised his hand and Harry’s jaw dropped even further. He was holding a wand, and it wasn’t Petri’s wand, either.

The elf waved the wand very violently at the plate of food. The piece of ham slid on top of the bread, and the cheese melted over it.

“Wizardling is eating his dinner now,” Rosenkol said, his bulging black eyes gleaming with some unknown emotion.

“Er, thanks, Rosenkol,” said Harry, shuffling over to the table.

Settling a little uncomfortably in the hard-backed wooden chair, he picked up his open-face sandwich. He wasn’t sure what exactly he had been expecting, but it tasted exactly like it looked. Just fine.

“It’s good,” he told Rosenkol, who for some reason looked relieved.

Harry was not sure if it would be rude to ask about the wand, but he could not help glancing back at it every now and then.

Petri finally took pity on him and told him, “It’s my latest project, another experimental wand. Rosenkol has been assisting me with the testing.”

“That’s pretty brilliant,” said Harry, because it was. He swallowed down the last of his dinner and Rosenkol immediately cleared the plate with further brandishing of his wand.

After dinner, Harry busied himself with some unpacking, which largely consisted of moving things from his trunk to the space underneath the bed and slinging his few casual robes over the backboard.

They set out for Silviu’s at twilight, just before eight, though it was plenty dark on account of being overcast. Harry had no doubt that Silviu was already up and about—the vampire was awake during the day far more often than he had the right to be. Indeed, as they entered the Coffin House accompanied by mournful tolling of bells, it was Silviu and not Leticia who stood behind the counter.

“Ah, Harry, Peters, welcome!” Silviu greeted with a jovial, close-lipped smile. He slunk around the counter to shake their hands. Harry’s he held for longer than strictly necessary, taking a moment to scrutinise him. Harry held his gaze, but could read nothing in it. “You’re right on time. The others are still trickling in.”

Even as he said this, the doorbell tolled again and an unfamiliar woman entered. She was short, perhaps only a few inches taller than Harry, and wore her black hair in a very severe bowl cut that did nothing to hide her pointed ears. Her dark skin was practically grey with vampiric pallor.

“Shy, welcome!” Silviu exclaimed, turning to the new arrival.

“Chairman,” said the presumed Shy, nodding. They clasped hands, as if to arm wrestle, and held them in the air for a few seconds before letting go.

“I’ll see you at midnight,” Petri told Harry.

“You’re leaving?” Harry demanded under his breath.

“I’m not invited. You’ll be fine,” Petri said, and gave Harry a firm pat on the shoulder before exiting the shop.

“Shy, this is Harry, our newest member. Harry, this is our treasurer, Shyverwretch, though she prefers Shy, yes?” said Silviu, reaching out and steering them to face each other.

“Er, nice to meet you,” said Harry, holding out his hand. Shy reached for it from below, like she and Silviu had done, and Harry raised his arm somewhat to go along with the alternate handshake.

“Likewise,” said Shy, her expression bland. Up close, Harry saw that her eyes were a disconcertingly bright green, like a cat’s.

“Do you run the poison shop?” Harry asked, remembering the name from a nearby storefront.

“Yes,” said Shy. “You should visit some time. Not afraid of snakes, are you?”

“Oh, no, I don’t mind them. I, er, I can talk to them,” said Harry. Shy seemed to warm up at that, though her ensuing smile revealed her dagger-like eyeteeth, which was perhaps not an improvement.

“Can you really? You’ve got to come by then. After the meeting,” she said.

“I’d love to, if I have time. My uncle is expecting me at midnight, though,” Harry told her.

“Plenty of time,” said Shy. “The meeting’s usually only an hour or two. The Crystal Wonders man is your uncle then?”

“Yeah,” said Harry, wondering if Petri had visited the poison shop before, or vice versa.

“I’ve been wondering about that. You’re in the company and he’s not?” Shy asked.

“It’s a complicated situation,” said Silviu. “The man’s a necromancer.”

Harry started, not sure how comfortable he was with that fact being tossed about casually, but he supposed there was nothing he could do about it.

“Oh, I see, I see,” said Shy, nodding her head slowly, almost mechanically. Then she peered carefully at Harry, and said, to Silviu, “How did you manage that one? When did you manage that one?”

“A year ago,” said Silviu. “I couldn’t just let him run through our alley unchecked.”

“A year ago,” said Shy flatly. “Why are we only now hearing about this?”

Silviu sighed deeply. “You aren’t going to like it,” he said.

“What a marvellous way to start,” Shy sneered.

“I kept postponing the announcement because I was hoping the bond would dissolve. It was involuntary,” said Silviu.

“What?” Shy demanded, taking a threatening step forwards. “You’re saying you broke the charter and risked all our lives and didn’t say a word? For a year?”

“I risked nothing,” Silviu said firmly, his eyes glowing orange like two pinpricks of candlelight in the dim illumination. “Have patience and listen.”

Shy reeled, stepping back suddenly as if struck.

“First of all, we all agreed that we should not rely on the charter in a situation of mortal danger. All of us were, to the best of my knowledge, in mortal danger at that time. Perhaps something even worse than that. Annette can attest to it.”

“I’ll be sure to ask her,” said Shy.

Silviu ignored her confrontational tone and continued, “Afterwards I performed the memory charm and intended to allow the bond to dissolve. But not only did the bond hold, the charm itself was broken.”

He glanced to Harry, who looked to Shy, who had made a soft sound of surprise. Harry wondered if she had made the connection between a broken memory charm and torture. He winced a little. Did Silviu really need to go into such detail?

“I had hoped, after a year of little contact, that the bond would finally fade, but it has not, and I can no longer deny it. Does that satisfy you?”

“Fine. Thank you, Chairman,” said Shy, looking away. “I’m sorry for questioning you.”

Silviu winced audibly. “No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to exert my gaze.”

“You shouldn’t apologise for _that,_ ” said Shy. “I’ll see you at the meeting.”

She turned away and made for the back room.

“What was that about?” Harry asked Silviu when she had disappeared behind the door. “What’s this bond that you’re talking about?”

“The blood bond between you and me,” said Silviu. “It’s what makes you part of the company.”

“You mean, it formed when you bit me?” Harry asked.

“And then shared my blood,” Silviu added.

But they hadn’t shared blood, had they? Harry’s thoughts flitted to Petri, who seemed convinced that nothing of the sort had happened.

“You don’t remember, perhaps,” said Silviu. “I’m sorry for memory charming you.”

“You’re sorry it didn’t work,” Harry corrected. Silviu smiled sadly.

“I wanted to introduce you to everyone tonight. Officially. But if you really don’t want to be part of my company, you don’t have to. We can keep waiting. The bond is supposed to fade on its own if I don’t renew it,” he said.

It suddenly occurred to Harry that he was talking to an actual vampire. Surely Silviu knew more than the bits and pieces he’d puzzled together from the Hogwarts library, Hermione, and Madam Pomfrey?

Even as his thoughts flashed to the hospital wing, and the blood, Silviu’s face fell.

“You drank human blood?” he asked, though by his expression Harry knew that he already knew. Of course.

“Stop reading my mind,” Harry demanded.

“Stop thinking of me while you think other things,” said Silviu.

That was the problem?

“It won’t keep me out,” Silviu admitted, “but I won’t look.”

The image of a dark tunnel and two passing ships struck Harry suddenly. _Also, it goes both ways._

“Oh,” said Harry, feeling a little thick. For some reason, he’d assumed Silviu was doing it on purpose. The actual problem was probably that Harry had no skill at mind magic, and could not take advantage of the connection.

“Anyway, you haven’t felt tired during the day? No? Paralysed by running water? No. Aversion to garlic? Yes? But like an allergy, curious. Show me what drinking blood felt like. Yes, that’s exactly it; seems like you really do need it. Hmm. It’s like you’re halfway turned. I’ve never seen anything like this,” Silviu concluded.

Harry looked away, privately—now that he knew how—privately thinking of what Petri had said about him momentarily dying, and how he would not become a vampire unless he “stayed dead.” It sounded like Petri was probably right, which was simultaneously troubling and reassuring.

“So what does that mean?” Harry asked. He felt confused and troubled, and it took a moment to realise that these were Silviu’s emotions.

“I’m not entirely sure,” said the vampire. “I—”

Just then, the front door opened again to allow some newcomers inside, and Silviu broke off to go greet them.

 _Talk later, go join the others_ , Harry understood, and he entered the back room.

It looked completely different from usual. The model coffin houses had all been pushed against one wall, eclectic seating arrangements set up in their stead. Rickety wooden stools and large cushions were crammed between overstuffed divans, floral-patterned armchairs, and bean bags. It reminded Harry a little bit of the Ravenclaw common room, only squashed into a much smaller place. At one end of the room there was some clear space and small table had been stacked on top of a larger one to make a podium of sorts.

There was already an assortment of people there. Harry recognised several of them—the hag from the Spiny Serpent, who was cackling merrily with Leticia, Mr Moribund the solicitor with his blackboard, and of course, Annette, who was sitting primly in a chair in the front row, whispering to Shy. Annette waved at him as he entered.

Harry went up to her and was about to take a seat when Annette beckoned for him to come even closer.

“Hello Harry. Front row’s for the presenters,” she whispered, and Harry felt his ears heat up a little, though of course he couldn’t have known. He sat down cross-legged on a low pouf towards the back, instead.

More people trickled in over the next few minutes, mostly hags and vampires, though Harry saw a handful of probable-humans as well. There didn’t seem to be anybody else his age. The room had mostly filled up when Silviu finally entered, securing the door behind him with several wordless spells.

“Good evening everyone,” he said at an even volume, and all the chatter in the room abruptly ceased. “Are we all here? Looks like it. Before we get started, I’d like to introduce you all to our company’s newest member—Harry, could you stand up?”

Feeling exceedingly self-conscious, Harry got to his feet, which did not really give him much height advantage over sitting. Dozens of eyes turned on him, and he wasn’t sure where to look. He turned to the front, and Silviu gave him an encouraging smile and nod.

“Hi everyone. I’m Harry,” Harry said, hoping that that was enough.

He got a sense of approval and a mental thumbs-up from Silviu, and he sat down again.

“There’ll be time to socialise after the meeting. Tonight’s agenda.”

Silviu stopped talking and instead Harry got the literal image of a piece of parchment in his mind’s eye, with the word, “Agenda” scrawled across the top, and below it, “General news.” Then came the leering face of a goblin, a pile of gold, Shy’s face from a strange, high angle, Annette, a red-robed auror, the concept of prison, Leticia and the Leaky Cauldron, and finally the sound of a chattering crowd and the image of raised hands.

None of this made much sense at first, but over the course of the meeting it all grew clear.

“For the general news,” Silviu began, out loud once more, “Markus and Cordelia are officially engaged as of yesterday evening. Congratulations, Markus.”

Enthusiastic clapping and whistling broke out, and Harry joined in uncertainly. He followed everybody’s gaze to a gangly man with a nasty scar across his throat and subtly shimmering tattoos covering almost every inch of his skin. He was grinning widely with flat, obviously human teeth. Whoever Cordelia was, it seemed that she wasn’t present.

“When’s the wedding?” asked Silviu, though he clearly already knew.

“October eleventh. We got a muggle place,” said Markus.

“Looking forward to it,” said Silviu. He paused to allow another round of applause. “Next, ELM is looking for somebody interested in becoming an undertaker’s apprentice. Please spread the word. Squibs and non-humans welcome. That’s it for me. Our treasurer will give an update on the situation with the goblins.”

Silviu stepped down from the makeshift podium and sat down next to Annette, while Shy took his place. She was too short to look over the top of the stacked tables, and elected to stand in front of them instead.

“The goblins still haven’t found a way to force us to declare commercial vaults, and I plan to keep it that way. If you recall, last month they raised our vault fees to five percent, the maximum on personal vaults and barely better than commercial. Luckily, they have no idea who is and isn’t in our company, and they hit Borgin and Burke’s with the rate hikes as well. They’ve got some friends in high places, and our rates are back down to one percent, retroactively. I’m sure the goblins will realise their error soon enough, but we can expect to be left in peace for at least one quarter. Any questions?”

Shy paused and looked all around the room.

“Sales are up in pre-fabricated everyday items and down in dark arts paraphernalia. The main driver is the DMLE focus—aurors have been increasingly cracking down on hex hobbyists. Overall gross margin was behind plan this month by five hundred galleons due to an unexpected rise in floo powder costs. However, operating income is ahead because of our lower Gringotts fees. Dividends will be disbursed on Monday as always. That’s all I have.”

Shy waited a few moments more for questions before returning to her seat. Harry had only a vague idea of what she had talked about, made rather worse by her stoic, unwaveringly flat tone of delivery.

Annette stood up next, shuffling to the front.

“Hi everyone,” she began, at a strong whisper, “The alley watch is reporting increased auror presence during the day. There’s no sign of them backing off, so everybody, please be careful. I received word that two of our tertiary brothers were arrested for possession of cursed artefacts with intent to afflict.”

“Edwin and Melville,” said an old woman, hunchbacked but probably not a hag, from the left side of the room. “Reckless boys.”

“It’s a shame. Azkaban will do ‘em in,” said the hag from the Spiny Serpent. Her enormous hat slid down over her nose, muffling whatever she said next.

“Aw, don’t say that,” said Leticia, “They’re strong boys, they’ll show the dementors what’s what.”

“Wonder what they were possessing,” said another hag. “Next thing you know, lads getting arrested for possessing sleepy candles.”

For some reason, all the hags tittered at that.

Annette cleared her throat, and speculation died down.

“Let’s move on. On the other side of the wall, the muggle monitors have found three new friends. We’re also looking for more monitors. If you’re interested or know anybody who might be, please let me know after the meeting. Thanks.”

With that, Annette returned to her seat, slumping so that her hair hung in front of her face like a closing curtain.

Next up was Leticia, who hobbled up to the front and clambered onto the large table, grinning widely and swinging her pointed feet.

“I made a new friend last week. His name’s Tom. That’s right, Tom the barman at the Cauldron. Friendly chap served me up some pork liver. Highly recommend. Nothing so good as a good muggle liver, but it hits the spot.”

Leticia jumped down and shuffled back into her corner without saying anything else. Harry was half horrified, half bemused by her announcement, but from the excitable whispering of the hags in the room, he figured Leticia’s words had not been intended for him.

Silviu went up to the podium again. “Thank you Leticia, Ettie, Shy. I want to open up general discussion now. Please raise your hands.”

A dozen hands went up, one after the other, and Silviu picked up a quill from the desk and began scribbling, presumably to note names.

Harry sat back, still completely bewildered by the meeting. Why was he here? He didn’t like to think of himself as a child, but in a room surrounded by adults discussing things that he did not understand, he could not help feeling painfully young.

The open discussion was even more confusing than the announcements. People brought up everything from ill pets to potions ingredient prices to international news. All inquiries seemed to be directed at Silviu, and impressively, the vampire had a ready answer for everything.

After the meeting, just as Harry was floundering in his corner, wondering whether to leave or stay, Shy shoved through the crowd to reach him and held out a hand.

“Come on, kid, let’s go hang around my shop,” she said.

Fleetingly, Harry thought that it was perhaps not the best idea to leave with a stranger in the middle of the night without Petri’s knowledge, but then he was already halfway out the door. Silviu smiled and waved at him, apparently unconcerned.

“What’s your favourite sort of snake?” Shy asked as they walked along the starlit alley.

“Er, I don’t really know,” said Harry, feeling ignorant.

“I have a runespoor,” said Shy. “You’ll love it.”

They arrived at Shyverwretch’s Venoms and Poisons in no time, and Shy kicked open her door and snapped her fingers. A dozen candles flared to life and revealed a dingy, cramped shop stuffed with crates and shelves, all crammed full of phials and flasks with multicoloured contents. Harry glanced back to the door and saw that the frosted glass there and in the window was opaque with what looked like centuries of encrusted grime.

“This way,” said Shy, leading him through a labyrinth of shelves. Harry stepped gingerly, wary of catching his elbow somewhere and sending vials of what was presumably poison crashing to the ground. They squeezed through a tiny opening to get behind the narrow counter and Shy ushered him through a back door into a pitch dark room.

Harry got a bad feeling, like he was about to have the door slammed behind him, but Shy only snapped again to illuminate this new room, revealing rows of gigantic glass terrariums stacked one on top of the other from floor to ceiling.

Whispers flared up along with the firelight.

“It’s back!” said a chorus of voices.

“What’s that? Another one?”

“Hungry, so hungry.”

“Shut up. You just ate. I’m the hungry one.”

“I’ll eat the both of you.”

Harry’s head whipped left and right, trying to follow the raucous dialogue of what appeared to be dozens of snakes, many of which had vibrant hues or even flashed multiple colours.

Shy led Harry all the way to the back of the room, where the entire wall was taken up by a single terrarium that housed an enormous, three-headed snake that was twice as long as Harry was tall. It was bright orange, with uneven black stripes, like a tiger. For some reason, there was a metal cone strapped to one of the heads, but not the other two.

Naturally, Harry asked, “What’s the cone for?”

“To protect the right head, so the other two don’t off it. And to protect the others from it. The right head is the one that’s venomous,” Shy explained.

“Look, there’s a new one,” said the left head.

“I can’t bloody look, look for yourself,” the right head snapped.

The left head knocked into the cone, hissing angrily.  “I wasn’t talking to you!”

“It’s brought a hundred mice for us,” said the middle head, swaying and pressing close to the glass.

“You don’t even know how big a hundred is, idiot,” the right head muttered.

“They’re bickering,” Harry told Shy with some bemusement.

“That’s what they do,” Shy said. “Try talking to them.”

“Hello,” Harry tried. All three heads froze and turned to him as one, and the runespoor reared up.

“It talks. Ask it for mice,” said the left head.

“All you ever think about is food,” the right head spat.

“One hundred mice,” the middle head ordered.

“Have you got any mice?” Harry asked Shy.

“Loads,” she said. “You can feed them if you want. Though it’s not that exciting.” 

Shy walked back up the room a ways and opened a narrow door that was between two tanks, revealing a closet full of barrels that were about Harry’s height. She dragged one out with little effort and popped the lid off, reaching inside and coming up with a very stiff-looking brown mouse.

“They’re petrified, but it wears off when I put them in,” she said, going up to the glass.

“A mouse, a mouse!” the left runespoor head hissed wildly. “Get it!” It made a sort of halfhearted lunge, smacking against the glass with a low thud.

“Ouch! You dunderhead,” the right head snarled. “Get a hold of yourself.”

“Eat tree bark,” the left head retorted, snapping its jaws at the right.

Shy closed her fist tightly around the frozen mouse, and it seemed to shrink until it disappeared into a little shadowy miasma. It appeared about a meter away, inside the runespoor’s terrarium, where it dropped to the ground and darted off, now unpetrified.

“You can apparate objects like that?” Harry demanded.

“Neat, innit?” said Shy. “But you’re a wizard, right? So you can do loads of different magic.”

“Nothing like that,” Harry said. “At least, I’ve never seen anything like it. I only just finished my first year at Hogwarts, though.”

“That’s school?” Shy asked. Harry nodded. “How old are you, anyway?”

Harry frowned. Why were people always interested in his age? “You first. How old are you?” he shot back.

Shy laughed. “I’m twenty-one. How’s that? Your turn.”

“Eleven,” Harry said. “Almost twelve.”

“And the chairman put his teeth in you without asking?” Shy muttered, shaking her head. “Well, I suppose some of the friends are about your age.”

“What friends?” Harry asked.

“Friends of the company. You know, kids that come to us for protection or goods. He really didn’t tell you anything, did he?”

“No, nothing. And I didn’t understand any of that meeting,” said Harry, eager to hear more. In fact, as much as Silviu seemed to love hovering over Harry and nosing into his business, Harry had never felt like the vampire actually listened to what he had to say.

“Well of course you wouldn’t have,” Shy said, “At your age I barely knew my way around percentages, forget financial reports. All the main company attends those meetings though. Say, is Crystal Wonders one of the company’s businesses, then?”

“Er, I’m not sure,” said Harry. “It’s under my name, but my uncle runs it.”

“I see. Your uncle. The necromancer? I pretended I knew what the chairman was talking about but actually I don’t have the faintest idea. What’s so bad about necromancers?” Shy asked.

“Er, I don’t know either, really,” said Harry. He knew for sure that Petri was a criminal, a dark wizard, but what that had to do with necromancy specifically was not totally clear to him. In principle, animating dead bodies and using them for divination did not hurt anybody.

Then again, there were horcruxes.

“Oh, okay. I thought it was just me being ignorant again. I don’t know much about you wizards, to be honest. I used to be what you lot call a muggle,” Shy told him.

“But your name’s Shyverwretch,” Harry protested, after a beat of surprise. That was the least mugglish name he’d ever heard. The Dursleys would have gone into hysterics at the sight.

“I made that up because my old name’s too plain for a vampire,” Shy explained, “but it’s a little over the top. Shyverwretch sounds like some nasty old hag’s name.”

“I think it’s pretty wicked,” said Harry. Shy flashed him a fanged grin.

“Thanks.”

“Strike! Kill! Go, go!” the snake shrieked behind her.

“Shut up! I’m trying to concentrate,” said the right head, lunging for the scrabbling mouse. It dashed its cone against the ground, sending a flurry of wood chips clattering into the glass. The mouse streaked diagonally across the terrarium, whereupon the middle head swooped down lazily to snatch it up.

“Where’d it go?” the right head demanded, swivelling about.

“Mm… mouse...” murmured the middle head.

“Does it need to eat three times as much, or does it only have one stomach?” Harry asked Shy, gesturing to the runespoor.

“One stomach,” said Shy. “Or something like that. To be honest, I have no idea what’s inside that bloody thing. Did you know it lays eggs through its mouth? Mental, innit?”

“That does seem strange,” Harry agreed, though perhaps it was perfectly reasonable for magical creatures.

“They’re worth good money,” Shy said, shrugging. “Say, how’d you learn to talk to snakes, anyway? You weren’t having me on, were you?” She narrowed her eyes.

“No, look, I’ll show you,” said Harry.

Actually he was a little nervous that he would embarrass himself completely by speaking plain English, as that was how the snake language sounded to him. He focused on the runespoor’s left head and said, “Hey, do you want another mouse?”

“Ninety mice,” said the middle head.

“Ninety-nine,” the left head corrected.

“You two are real tree biters!” cried the right head. “Yes, I want a mouse.”

“I’ll go get one,” Harry said. He turned to Shy, who was staring at him open-mouthed.

“That’s so wicked! Can you teach me?”

“Talking tree, go now and get us a mouse,” the left head commanded. Harry realised it was addressing him, and wasn’t sure whether to feel offended.

“Er, let me get a mouse first. That’s all it seems interested in,” Harry said. Shy snorted and helped him retrieve another mouse, which she apparated into the terrarium as before.

“How do you say ‘mouse’?” she asked Harry. “Actually, how does this even work? There’s no way it’s hearing that hissing you’re making. I suppose it’s a kind of magic?”

“I dunno,” Harry admitted. “It just sounds like English to me, actually. Let me try saying ‘mouse.’” He turned to the snake and said, “Mouse,” trying to focus on listening to what he actually said. Sure enough, even though the English word was echoing around inside his skull, it turned out that what had come out of his mouth really was a low hissing.

“I’ve got this. Us vampires do plenty of hissing too, you know? Let me try. Listen,” Shy said. A strangled, inhuman hiss seemed to emanate in every direction, echoing around the room and carrying with it the vague connotation of food.

“Food?”

“Mice? Where?”

“Hungry!”

A flurry of susurration erupted all throughout as the snakes grew agitated in their tanks.

“It worked!” Shy shrieked. “This is so brilliant. Teach me other ones.”

They spent the next hour going through vocabulary that was commonly used by snakes. As far as Harry could tell, it was possible to say anything in the serpent language, but actual snakes mostly talked about eating, sleeping, hunting, and danger. The runespoor was also fond of various tree-related insults.

“I’m surprised you can make some of these sounds,” Shy said, after they’d spent a particularly long while working on the word, “big.” “I had to collapse my lung for that one.”

“Er, that sounds painful,” said Harry.

Shy shrugged. “I don’t need to breathe to live so it doesn’t matter. Still, I think that’s enough for tonight. When were you supposed to be getting back?”

“Midnight,” said Harry, panicking as he fumbled for his wand. “What time is it?” he muttered. The wand read out eleven thirty, and he sighed with relief. “It’s only eleven thirty,” he said.

“Your wand works like a watch too? Neat,” Shy said. “How about I walk you home? You won’t run into any trouble with me around. I am the trouble.”

Harry agreed, and Shy locked up her shop temporarily.

“Do people buy poisons a lot?” Harry asked. There had been no customers for the past hour.

“In person? Not really,” said Shy. “I get plenty of owl order business though, don’t you worry. Most of my customers are actually bulk buyers. So er, where do you live?”

“Sixty-six Knockturn. The graveyard,” Harry told her.

“What, in the plots? That’s where I live too!” Shy exclaimed.

Of course, Harry realised; she was a vampire, after all.

“I live in C-10, what about you?” she asked.

“D-12,” said Harry.

“We’re practically neighbours. I can’t believe I’ve never seen you.”

“I don’t get out much, and I was at Hogwarts all year,” Harry pointed out.

“You were out learning magic all year?” Shy asked. Harry nodded. “Why does it take so long? I got all my powers down in a month, and I thought I was slow. I suppose it’s different for wizards?”

“It must be. Hogwarts is seven years,” Harry informed her.

“Blimey,” she muttered. “Do you do that on top of the usual maths and history and such?”

“Er, not really, there’s no maths, and we only have magical history,” said Harry.

“No maths?” Shy demanded. “Sacrilege.”

Harry, for his part, was perfectly fine with there being no more maths. Primary had been bad enough.

They reached the gate to the cemetery, and Shy paused. “Are you fine to go from here? I just realised… I think the chairman probably wouldn’t want me meeting with your uncle, by myself, I mean, not in public. No offence, but you know, or maybe you don’t know; none of us know.”

“It’s fine,” said Harry, agreeing completely. It was probably for the best that as few people met Petri as possible. “Thanks for walking with me.”

“No problem. You know where I live now. Feel free to come by. I close shop around six. You’re free to come by the shop too, of course,” said Shy.

“Alright, thanks.”

It was an uneventful walk across the cemetery, and Harry made it to the coffin house unmolested. He slotted his round key into the cover and the door clicked open.

“Harry?” said Petri, sounding surprised. “Did you walk home by yourself?”

“Er, no, one of the other vampires walked with me,” he said.

“One of the primary company?” Petri asked.

“Er, I suppose? What does primary mean?”

Petri sighed. “The vampire’s direct victims are part of the primary company. If one of the primary company members becomes a vampire, then their victims are the secondary company, and so on. I received a reference on this topic from an illustrious neighbour of ours. _Accio.”_

A vaguely familiar red volume extricated itself from the pile on the table and zoomed towards Petri’s outstretched hand. He deflected it at the last moment and banished it at Harry instead. He glanced down.

_Blood Brothers: My Life Amongst the Vampires._

“I’ve read some of this before,” Harry said, remembering his unfruitful foray into the Hogwarts library on this topic. “Are you sure the stuff in here is true?”

“While the style is questionable, the content is most informative,” Petri assured him. “You can read it later. How was the meeting?”

Harry wrinkled his nose. “Boring. Most of it was way over my head. They were talking about business and not getting arrested by aurors.”

“Ah, so it was with the whole company?” Petri asked.

Harry was about to nod when he remembered, vaguely, that Silviu had once claimed his company had hundreds of members. There had only been maybe twenty people at that meeting, but there had been talk of others, so Harry said, “I think it was just the, er, primary company.”

“I see. So it was all strictly business? Nothing untoward?” Petri pressed.

“Nothing untoward,” Harry confirmed. What had Petri been expecting? A bloodbath? If that was the case, he ought not to have sent Harry in the first place.

“Good, good. I looked at your exercises while you were gone. Overall, good work. We can talk about the details later,” Petri said.

Harry’s nodded, a little surprised that Petri had not torn his half-hearted answers apart. His exercises had been rather low-priority for him, and by the time he reached them he had usually spent all his eloquence on essays for his school subjects. Harry shrugged to himself and prepared for bed.

He dreamt about snakes with red eyes, potions, and pneumothorax, and woke up feeling very groggy.

Petri was already up and sitting at the table again, making notes of some kind. The whole picture didn’t make any sense.

“Did you sleep?” Harry asked him.

“No,” said Petri, but he didn’t look or sound sleep-deprived. “I have moved to a more nocturnal schedule, as it is better for business.”

“Oh. Uh, how’s the shop?” Harry asked.

“Doing quite well. I hired one of our landlord’s ‘friends’ as a shop boy on weekends,” Petri said, making air quotations around the word, “friends.”

“Friends are people who, er, work with the company?” Harry asked, for confirmation.

“Mostly squibs and muggles who’ve been bitten, but not killed or given blood,” Petri corrected.

Harry remembered Shy saying that she used to be a muggle.

“Isn’t that bad for, er, secrecy? Muggles?” he asked.

“From what I’ve seen, our landlord keeps his ‘friends’ very well-contained,” was Petri’s cryptic answer.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Harry pressed, immediately suspicious. He knew Petri was being vague on purpose.

“Why don’t you ask him yourself? He is your company, after all,” Petri said.

Even though he got the feeling that Petri was trying to bait him into discovering something he wouldn’t like, the idea at face value wasn’t a bad one. Harry had a lot of questions for Silviu, and last night had done nothing to answer them like he’d hoped. He had been so distracted by Shy’s shop and the fun of sharing the snake language with someone so genuinely friendly and enthusiastic that he had forgotten about his intention to talk with Silviu.

“Wouldn’t he be asleep by now?” Harry asked.

“Perhaps not,” said Petri. “It’s still early.”

“I’ll go check his shop,” Harry said. He paused and peered at Petri, wondering if the man was going to take issue with his intent to go outside alone. But there was no reaction, even as he climbed to the top of the stairs and pushed open the front door.

Not questioning this sudden lack of concern—it seemed like Petri had really bought into the whole idea of being part of the vampire company protecting him somehow—Harry hurried outside.

It was still early morning, not too muggy yet, and thankfully not raining. However, the clouds were grey and dark overhead, effectively blotting out the sun. It looked like vampire weather.

Petri had been right; Silviu certainly was still awake. He was leaning over the counter, talking with Leticia when Harry walked into the Coffin House, and he broke out into a smile when he turned around and saw who had entered.

“Harry!” he called. Leticia immediately burst into peals of unpleasant laughter. Silviu turned to shoot her a reproachful look.

“Fixated you are, you old dog,” Leticia hacked out in between giggles.

“I’m not fixated,” said Silviu evenly, obviously trying not to sound defensive. It didn’t work. The hag peered at him from under her tangle of grey hair with shrewd eyes.

“I don’t blame you. He looks very tasty. Don’t you, Harry?” Leticia addressed him directly. Harry was a little taken aback, and uncertain whether to be offended.

He didn’t get the sense that the hag was trying to be mean, so he shrugged and said, “Er, thanks.”

This response nearly unseated Leticia as her whole body shook with mirth. If nothing else, she seemed to have a very robust sense of humour.

“Not that I’m not glad to see you about, Harry, but what are you doing here?” Silviu asked, ignoring the hysterical hag behind him.

“I, er, I wanted to talk,” Harry said. “I want to know more about the bond, the company, everything.”

“Of course, you must have so many questions,” Silviu said, nodding. “I have some errands to run, but why don’t you come with me? We can talk on the way.”

Harry agreed, though he had some misgivings about what sorts of errands a vampire would be running. Surely not getting groceries?

For the first time, he noticed what Silviu was wearing. He wasn’t clad in solid black robes as usual, but instead in an equally black muggle tailcoat and trousers. With his high-heeled shoes, silver hair tied back severely, and rounded hat, he looked like a displaced nobleman out of the last century.

“Where are we going?” Harry asked.

It transpired that he was going to have one of his burning questions answered directly, and that Silviu was, in fact, getting groceries, in the vampire sense.

“First, we’re going to see some friends,” the vampire told him. “I need a pick-me-up.”

“Friends of the company?” Harry asked. Silviu nodded. “Shy told me they’re, er, squibs and muggles who come for protection.” He decided not to mention the things Petri had said.

“Something like that,” said Silviu. “Usually it’s more that they have nowhere else to go. I don’t want to lie to you Harry, so I won’t sugarcoat it. We don’t take them in out of the goodness of our hearts. They’re the majority of our blood supply.”

It became obvious to Harry also, when they arrived at their destination, what Petri had meant about the friends being “well-contained.”

“They’re prisoners,” Harry said, eyeing the grim, three-storey complex that was surrounded by a tall, iron fence topped with wicked barbs.

“The gate is to keep dangerous elements out,” Silviu said evenly. “But yes, you’re right, though not for the reasons you think. Our friends—it’s impossible for them to leave because they would never want to. They’re very happy here.”

Harry thought Silviu might be making some kind of sick joke, but he looked completely serious, and a little sad. It was that hint of sadness that stayed Harry’s tongue. He nodded and stayed close to Silviu as the vampire unlocked the gate with a spell and stepped into the forbiddingly ramshackle courtyard.

The invasive, bright green plant that grew all around Knockturn, which Harry now recognised as pygmy knotweed, from Herbology, had run rampant over the place, sprouting out between cracked bits of stone that must have once been part of the pavement. Silviu sighed and slashed his wand in a wide severing charm, clearing a path up to the front door.

Harry spotted movement in a grimy window, and the front door opened up before they could even reach it. A girl and a boy who looked maybe sixteen or seventeen ran out with wide smiles on their faces.

“Chairman!” they exclaimed, coming alarmingly close to Silviu and almost shoving Harry out of the way. Still, they stepped back easily as Silviu continued walking.

There were at least a dozen more people inside, all young, some, Harry saw, even about his age, as Shy had mentioned. They all looked genuinely delighted by the visit. There was nothing obviously off about them—they wore clean shirts and trousers and looked well-fed—but their open enthusiasm was disconcerting.

They moved forward as one, crowding Silviu and greeting him by his title, and craning their necks to get a good look at him—no, Harry realised with sudden horror, they weren’t trying to glimpse him, they were showing off their necks on purpose, offering them to the vampire.

“Friends, I know I have kept you waiting, but please, one at a time,” Silviu admonished, as one might unruly schoolchildren. Remarkably, the friends queued up in an instant, with only minimal jostling. Silviu glanced over to Harry.

“You don’t have to stay for this if you don’t want to,” he said.

Harry, though he felt a little queasy, shook his head. “It’s fine,” he said. “Er, if you’re fine with it.”

Silviu nodded. He motioned to the first friend, who practically leapt into his arms and tilted her head back eagerly. Silviu leaned forward, and if Harry hadn’t known better, he would have thought that he had given her no more than a kiss. The contact was extremely brief, and the vampire swallowed exactly once.

He repeated this process with every friend in the queue. There were a few, Harry noticed, who had hung back and not joined the others. Silviu took no notice of them. By the time all the friends were through, Silviu was flushed and rosy, and had shed about ten years of age. He wiped his mouth on a handkerchief, an unnecessary motion as no blood had escaped, and gestured to Harry that he was ready to leave.

Harry was bursting with questions, and wasn’t sure how to feel. The first thing he asked was, “Is that sanitary?”

Silviu’s now-dark eyebrows shot up into his hairline. “What?”

“They won’t get infected?” Harry clarified, but Silviu still looked confused.

“I’d have to give them my blood to change them,” he began, but Harry shook his head impatiently.

“Not with vampirism, I mean they won’t get, you know, normal infection?” he said.

“What normal infection?” Silviu asked. Harry was incredulous for a moment, and then decided that maybe he was the ignorant one, though he didn’t see how. He could already guess that wizards didn’t get non-magical infections, but these weren’t wizards.

“They don’t get feverish and die?” he tried. “It’s just, when muggles get cuts, bites, especially, they sometimes get worse instead of better.”

“I’ve never seen that happen. It always heals up fine as long as I don’t take too much,” Silviu said, and Harry couldn’t detect any hint of guile, only honest confusion. He supposed he had no choice but to believe it.

“All right then. Why were they, er, so excited?” he asked next. He didn’t remember very clearly what it was like to get bitten, but he did recall that it had hurt as much as one might expect.

“They’re enthralled by me. Literally. The effect is very short-lived on wizards but on muggles it’s essentially permanent unless I try to end it on purpose,” Silviu explained.

“Is that legal?” said Harry flatly. “I thought it’s illegal to hex muggles.”

“It’s illegal to _hex_ them, of course,” said Silviu. “This isn’t a hex, it’s a natural effect. Every one of my friends invited me to bite them the first time, for various reasons, and I erased the memories of any muggles who refused me. It’s all above board.”

All this sounded plausible to Harry, and he did not know enough about law to contradict Silviu, so he reluctantly nodded.

Something still seemed vaguely wrong about the situation, like he knew he should have been outraged by it, but he couldn’t put his finger on the problem. After all, he didn’t get the sense that Silviu was lying, and what he had said made logical sense. Harry had assumed that Silviu must be doing something fishy because he knew for a fact that hurting people was wrong, and couldn’t imagine how Silviu could drink blood without hurting people, but those people had looked far from hurt.

“Where are we going now?” Harry asked, not quite able to formulate any of his other thoughts on the friends. He would think about the matter more later.

“The muggle world,” said Silviu.

“Maybe I should leave my robes at your shop,” Harry suggested.

“Do you have something to change into?” Silviu asked.

Harry unbuttoned his robe and Silviu flinched away for a second before he saw the T-shirt and trousers underneath. They were old, ratty, and slightly to large for him, having once belonged to Dudley, but he didn’t have any other undershirts. Petri, like many wizards, as Harry had learned in the dormitories at Hogwarts, did not believe in wearing anything under his robes. Personally, Harry thought that at least trousers (and certainly pants, for Merlin’s sake) were a must.

Silviu took his robe and shoved it into what appeared to be an errant shadow, which left him empty-handed. It was the same thing Shy had done with the mouse last night.

“How do you apparate things like that, without yourself?” Harry asked. “Is there a wizard spell that can do that?”

“I think that would be vanishing and conjuring,” said Silviu, “and not apparating. Splinching, I think it’s called, seems much more dangerous for wizards. I’ve heard you can lose body parts. But maybe you can learn to walk like a vampire. I’m still curious about your partial turning… do you need any blood, by the way? I’m sorry, I should have asked earlier.”

The thought of drinking blood from a live human was a little too much for Harry, and he shook his head vigorously. “No, I’m fine. The healer said I’d feel sluggish if I needed to. Does that seem right?”

“Yes, like you can’t stay awake,” Silviu confirmed, “though excessive sunlight can feel like that as well. And, more obviously, I should think, you’ll be unbearably thirsty.”

“I don’t remember feeling thirsty,” Harry said, trying to think back to the visit with Madam Pomfrey. Surely he would have noticed such a symptom. Silviu hummed under his breath.

“Interesting. Well, like I said, I’ve never seen whatever this is, with the bond not fading and you half turned, so I don’t know much more than you do,” he said.

Harry remembered that Petri had also been under the impression that the vampire curse would get better on its own, at least until the matter of his dying.

“So the bond is supposed to go away?” Harry asked. Silviu made a weird pained noise.

“It’s supposed to be reinforced frequently,” he said. “To go over a year—it’s been almost a year and a half, really—without any reinforcement is unheard of.”

Harry had a suspicious feeling about the word “reinforcement.”

“You mean you’re supposed to, what, bite me again?” he demanded.

“Share blood,” Silviu corrected. “It’s really not as bad as you’re imagining. It’s not bad at all. I know you don’t remember the first time properly, and, well, it wasn’t proper anyway. I’m sorry. I want to make it up to you however I can.”

Harry hated that Silviu always apologised whenever the matter was brought up, because he couldn’t justify staying angry at somebody who had already owned up to a mistake multiple times.

“It’s fine,” Harry said. “I’m just still not interested.”

They turned onto the bright and lively cobblestones of Diagon Alley for a short moment before ducking through the transforming brick archway into the Leaky Cauldron, which at this time of morning was serving only a handful of groggy patrons.

At the threshold, Harry briefly wondered if Petri would have a problem with him gallivanting around muggle London, but then decided that he didn’t care.

Courtesy of the muggle-repelling charms, nobody paid them any mind as they exited the Leaky Cauldron and appeared in the middle of the pavement. Harry blinked rapidly, feeling as if all his senses had dulled suddenly. He had spent so long in the wizarding world that he had forgotten what it was like outside.

It was simultaneously too fast and too slow. People and things were moving—a bus was trundling by and there were muggles milling about everywhere—but the buildings were stone and silent, their colours unchanging and their shadows unassuming. There were no raised voices, no boisterous shouts, only the low, unintelligible hum of people passing each other by in a hurry.

“Hold my hand. We’re walking,” Silviu said.

Harry assumed he meant the unpleasant sort of walk, and asked, “Why did we come out here first then?”

Silviu grimaced. “Can’t leave or enter the Alleys without being traced. Out here, no one will know where we’re going.”

Harry put his hand in Silviu’s, and braced himself. They took a step forward and sunk into a nearby shadow, which seemed to leap up and smother them in black tar. Harry held his breath this time, and shut his eyes tightly until the warm, slimy feeling disappeared.

Maybe it was a touch better than apparition, he decided, when they emerged on the other side into crisp, cool air that carried off the last of the unpleasant sensation. At least there was no compression.

“Where are we?” he asked, squinting against the stiff breeze. They appeared to be on the roof of some building.

“Hospital,” said Silviu. As Harry could not think of any legitimate reason for them to be visiting a muggle hospital, he felt some trepidation. Silviu peered over the side of the building and gestured for him to approach. “Get on my back,” he said.

“Why?” Harry demanded.

“So we can get down.” Silviu said impatiently.

“Can’t we walk down?” Harry asked. Silviu shook his head.

“More effort than it’s worth,” he said. “Come on.”

Reluctantly, Harry put his arms over Silviu’s shoulders and held on tightly. The vampire stood with no difficulty and swung himself over the side of the roof.

Harry loved flying, and had no fear of heights, but dangling from Silviu’s back while he scaled a relatively smooth building with his bare hands was not the most pleasant of experiences. His fingers were stiff and bloodless by the time the reached the bottom, and Silviu had to peel him from his back.

Silviu glanced at the sky and frowned.

“It’s getting late. We’ll have to hurry,” he said, stepping out of the alleyway between the hospital and the adjacent building. Harry stuck close to him, unable to help glancing about in all directions. There weren’t any people around, only some cars parked on the side of the road. Silviu led him straight through the open gate underneath a great arch that read, “Saint Mary’s Hospital.”

“What are we doing here?” Harry whispered.

“Gathering food,” said Silviu, which was not really what Harry had wanted to hear, and raised more questions than it answered.

“What do you mean, food?” he demanded.

“Dead bodies,” Silviu clarified.

Then they were inside the hospital. Silviu walked confidently up to the receptionist and stared her in the eyes. She immediately acquired a slack expression and waved her arm vaguely. Silviu wasted no time in striding over to a nearby door and entering like he had every right to be there.

“This way,” he said, tapping Harry’s shoulder and steering them through myriad hallways and staircases. Whenever they ran into somebody, Silviu would repeat whatever trick he had done at the front desk and leave the person dazed, as if they had been confounded. Any secured doors he bypassed with a quick unlocking charm.

“Aren’t there cameras?” Harry whispered.

“Don’t worry, we can’t be photographed,” Silviu tried to assure him, though this statement left Harry more bewildered than relieved. He didn’t have time to think more on the matter, because then Silviu barged right into a very populated room.

Four heads whipped up to stare at the intruder. Silviu wasted no time in ensnaring the muggle doctors with his eye magic. One of them even dropped her clipboard in sudden inattention.

The room was large and there was medical equipment everywhere, jutting out from plastic boxes in the corners like twisted spider legs and running along the walls into bulky machines. No, those boxes—they were cots, Harry realised. There were babies in there, tiny and almost plastered over in patches and bandages and who-knew-what.

Silviu stared the doctors down for a few seconds more before he made a pleased sound.

“We’re very lucky, there’s a dead baby,” Silviu informed Harry cheerfully, and he strolled over to the far corner of the room and popped open the muggle device as one might crack a nut to get at the tasty morsel inside. Carelessly, he ripped the stickers and wires off the limp infant before re-wrapping it in its blanket and tucking it under his arm.

“What are you doing?” Harry hissed. “You can’t just—just take it.”

Silviu frowned. “It’s already dead,” he said. “The muggles certainly don’t need it.”

“But the parents,” Harry tried to protest, but Silviu held up a clawed finger and smiled indulgently.

“Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about them. Come on, that’s our last stop,” he said.

Silviu led them to a nearby room where a young woman was sleeping on a hospital bed, her presumed husband slumped over in the corner on a stool. The vampire took out his wand this time and cast memory charms on both of them.

“Now we can go,” Silviu said, holding out his hand. Harry was a little hesitant to hold the same hand that had just been touching a dead baby, but he couldn’t exactly refuse and strand himself in the middle of a muggle hospital, so he took it and shut his eyes.

Another encounter with the warm tar, which for some reason seemed to last twice as long this time, and they were back in front of the Leaky Cauldron.

As they stepped back into the wizarding world, Silviu with his prize in hand, Harry kept thinking that somebody would have to notice something wrong, and that they would be stopped, but they literally walked right past a pair of red-robed aurors and did not get so much as a sideways glance.

Harry managed to hold everything in until they returned to the Coffin House, whereupon he exploded in the threshold.

“What the bloody hell was that?” he cried. There were no words strong enough for this. “That can’t have been legal.”

Why did he care so much whether something was legal? Even as the word passed his lips, it seemed wrong to him, like he should have said something else. It was impossible to decipher what he was feeling, because none of it made sense.

Legality wasn’t important. He knew that. Petri was always doing illegal things, and Harry could not realistically do anything about it. The same logic extended to Silviu. But if legality did not matter, then what did? Something was the matter here. Harry just knew that he should be indignant, even though the only thing he could put his finger on right now was a sense of bewilderment.

Silviu didn’t look worried or offended. “Don’t be so sure about that,” he said conspiratorially. “The only spell I ever used on those muggles was the memory charm. It’s perfectly legal for me to do that, as I have an Obliviator’s license.”

“But you confounded all those other ones,” Harry protested, grasping for the easiest argument at hand.

“It wasn’t a spell,” said Silviu, smiling with his teeth now. “The Ministry can’t even put a name to it, let alone regulate it. They have no business telling us when we can or cannot use our natural defences anyhow, as long as we aren’t going around attacking wizards.”

Of course, that made sense; the Ministry of Magic was primarily concerned about wizards.

“But, the baby,” Harry said weakly.

“Did I hear ‘baby?’”

Leticia sprang out of her seat, disappeared behind the counter for a moment, and then came bounding up to them. She extended long arms with gnarled, twisted fingers.

Silviu held the baby up out of her reach, but did pull back the blanket to expose its wrinkled, slack face. Harry averted his eyes.

“Oh Silvy,” Leticia said, real tears in the corner of her eye, “you’re too good to us, you are. Let me have a closer look.”

Silviu snorted. “You can have a look at the same time as the others.”

Leticia withdrew her hands, her mouth twisting up. “You don’t trust me, Silvy? Only want a little taste…”

“There’s no need for that,” Silviu admonished her, “You know you’ll get your due. Get the others. Quickly. I’m exhausted.”

Harry looked Silviu over again and noted the creases at the corners of his sunken eyes and the silver streaking his hair. Perhaps doing magic was more taxing for Silviu than he had let on.

It was by now obvious that Leticia was intending to eat the baby. Hags ate children, didn’t they? He supposed the baby really was already dead, and that was better than if they had to kill somebody.

Leticia reached into the high collar of her robes and extracted a necklace of tiny bones. She pinched one between her fingers and used it to tap the others like a mallet. A moment later she said, “They’re on their way.”

Silviu nodded and handed the baby over. Leticia squealed in delight and cradled it to her chest, as if it were alive. She stuck her warty, pointed nose into the blankets and inhaled deeply.

“You have Harry to thank that we found it,” Silviu told her. Harry started, glancing back and forth between the baby and Silviu in confusion.

“Oh?” said Leticia.

“I was planning on going to the mortuary, but I didn’t want to take Harry too far and the hospital was closer. Hospital is hit or miss but obviously it went very well this time,” Silviu explained.

Leticia chuckled. “Harry’s a real lucky charm,” she said, grinning at him.

Harry didn’t feel very lucky; he just felt queasy again.

“I think it’s about time for me to turn in. Do you want me to walk you home?” Silviu asked Harry.

“No, it’s all right,” Harry said. “Er, I’ll just get going then. Good day, and thanks for letting me tag along.”

“Good day,” Silviu said, inclining his head. Leticia waved cheerfully as Harry left the shop.

Despite how out of sorts he was, he didn’t regret joining Silviu on his “errands.” The trip had answered more questions than he had even known he had had.

It was just starting to rain, and Harry wished he knew how to cast the water-repelling charm. How was it that he had learned so many charms already, but still came up short at every turn? By the time he made it home, he was soaked through and muddy.

Petri was asleep, tucked neatly into his bed. Harry grimaced and tried to dry himself off with the hot-air charm, with limited success. He checked the time. It was half past eleven, and he was starving, having forgotten about breakfast.

“Rosenkol,” he whispered, and the elf appeared instantly with a quiet pop. “Was gibt’s zum essen?”

He hoped the answer wasn’t nutritive potions.

Rosenkol glanced to Petri, put a long finger up to his lips, and then gestured for Harry to follow him into the trunk.

The space had been totally transformed. The extra furniture that had once been crammed into the front room had been cleared away and there were new cabinets installed above the narrow counters at either side. The makeshift jars of bluebell flame were gone, replaced by enchanted light orbs floating on the ceiling, which provided much stronger illumination and lent the room an almost welcoming air.

Rosenkol snapped his fingers and the cabinet doors flew open to reveal shelves stocked full of actual food. Harry saw heads of cabbage, wheels of cheese, bags of onions, potatoes, flour and more. His jaw almost dropped.

“When did we get all this?” he asked. The elf looked away, and seemed almost hesitant.

“Rosenkol is meeting others,” he began. “They are not considering Rosenkol well, they are saying that Rosenkol is unworthy of Master, that Rosenkol is a bad elf.” He was wringing his hands and had pressed his ears close to his head.

“Others? Other elves?” said Harry. Rosenkol nodded vigorously, and then tugged at his ears. Harry couldn’t believe it. Rosenkol had been, what, peer-pressured into learning to cook? “But what about, er, Master Joachim? He doesn’t think there’s anything, er, wrong with you, does he?”

Tears welled up in Rosenkol’s eyes. “Master Joachim is most kind and generous, he is saying that Rosenkol is a special elf, with special duties, and not worthless and wretched. He is even giving Rosenkol a wand to help, instead of sending him away.” The elf was sobbing now, though he was smiling at the same time. He produced the experimental wand that Harry had seen him using the previous evening. It didn’t look like any wand he had seen before. For one, it was very short, proportional to Rosenkol, who only came up to Harry’s chin, and for another, it was sharpened to a point.

“That’s good,” said Harry, who was rather confused. He knew that wands could make magic stronger and more precise, and that some spells could only be cast with wands, but based on the wonderful meals prepared wandlessly by the house elves at Hogwarts, cooking spells did not fall under that category. Harry had seen Rosenkol conjure spirits and vanish bodily remains with a snap of his fingers. He could not imagine how the elf could have trouble with cooking, wand or not.

Perhaps the problem was that Rosenkol did not know what human food was supposed to be like?

“Are the other elves teaching you how to cook then?” Harry asked. Rosenkol sniffed and rubbed at his eyes with his funeral shroud.

“They are not teaching what should already be known,” he said.

Harry frowned. “Well that’s unfair. They had to have learned it somehow too, right?” Even Aunt Petunia had never expected that Harry would magically know how to make food, and had spent time showing him.

“They are knowing,” said Rosenkol, shaking his head. “It is being in their blood. Rosenkol was a very bad elf and is not knowing anymore.”

Anymore? “What do you mean?” Harry asked. “Did something happen?”

“Wizardling is telling no one?” Rosenkol asked, eyes narrowed.

“You’re keeping my secret, so, er, Harry will keep yours,” Harry promised, remembering that Rosenkol liked it when he spoke in third person also. The elf wiped away the rest of his tears and nodded.

“Rosenkol was a very, very bad elf. Rosenkol…” his voice dropped to an almost inaudible level, “killed his bad master.”

“Oh,” said Harry. The first question that popped into his mind was how that was even possible. There had to be something to prevent assassination by house elf, didn’t there? Otherwise he figured he would have heard of it happening more often. He wasn’t sure if it would be insensitive to ask. Instead, he said, “He, er, he must have been really bad master then.”

Petri was a terrible person and Rosenkol adored him, after all.

Rosenkol twisted his ears. “He was putting Blumenkol in the fireplace for burning his dinner, so she would know what it is like to be burnt, yes, a fitting punishment.” His fingers curled against his head until they drew blood.

“Hey, what are you doing? Stop it,” Harry said, but Rosenkol didn’t seem to hear.

“Little Blumenkol was weak. She screamed and screamed but bad master had no mercy and she burnt up.” Tears dribbled down Rosenkol’s face, but still he continued with the story, “He said, he said, he would be having Blumenkol for dinner instead.”

He wasn’t talking about cauliflower. Harry’s mind froze in horror. Rosenkol’s name… it was like a sick joke. Rosenkol and Blumenkol. Had they been siblings?

“Rosenkol put the poison in his t-tea,” Rosenkol’s voice cracked. Harry didn’t know what to do. He put his arms around the bawling elf and patted his back.

He could not help going back to his first thought. How had Rosenkol managed it? How could this “bad master” still dare to eat or drink elf-made food after having so gruesomely murdered one of his own servants for a simple mistake? Wasn’t it obvious that the other house elf would exact revenge?

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Harry said. It was the surest thing he had said all day, as if his mind and heart were finally in the same place. “He deserved it.”


	35. Nexus

Petri woke up early in the evening to find Harry and Rosenkol covered in flour and the table laden with an assortment of misshapen biscuits and scones.

“I see that you have been hard at work,” he said, and Harry could not tell whether he was irritated or amused. “Rosenkol, tea.”

The elf hurriedly began to lay out the tea set, directing its movement with his wand. This was normally a task that Petri did for himself, so Harry shot him a questioning look.

“Rosenkol has been out of sorts all week,” Petri explained. “I’ve been a poor master to him lately, leaving him without duties. It’s brought up old insecurities.”

“Oh. He, er, told me, about his… past,” Harry said vaguely, uncertain if he was at liberty to discuss the topic. He assumed that Petri must know, and that he did not count as a third party to whom Harry could betray the elf’s trust, but it was better to be safe.

“I see,” Petri murmured, glancing briefly at Rosenkol, who was still focused on his task, and then at the pile of baked goods. “He also allowed you to assist him. Interesting.”

Harry flushed. “Well, it was my idea to practise cooking,” he admitted. “Rosenkol said a house elf’s cooking has to be flawless, and I thought, practice makes perfect. But also, I told him, ‘Es ist dem Meister egal, was er isst…’”

He waited for a stinging hex, but Petri only smirked at him, before summoning a biscuit and taking an experimental bite.

“It’s true,” he agreed, “I don’t care what I eat. This is acceptable. Still, I don’t understand your fascination with servant’s work. I remember you were clamouring to learn cooking and cleaning charms last year. Despite his familiarity with you, Rosenkol is not your equal.”

“He’s a person, too,” Harry protested. He knew that Petri knew that.

“He is, and he has his needs, which include serving a master. You are a wizard, not an elf,” Petri explained with surprising patience.

Harry narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean, he needs to serve a master? Needs to, how?”

“A house elf’s magic depends on love and self-sacrifice. Loving someone who does not love you as much in return puts you in a subservient position.” Petri sighed deeply at this, and closed his eyes. “One does not choose whom to love, unfortunately.”

Petri sounded as if he knew this from personal experience, which was unfathomable to Harry. He tried to imagine Petri writing sentimental poetry for some giggling girl and only managed to nauseate himself. Also, he realised, this assertion did nothing to support the argument that house elves had to be servants.

“Wizards can love people too,” he pointed out. “How is that different?”

“And do you love me?” Petri challenged, eyebrows raised.

Harry bit back a wince. He had walked right into that one.

“Well, er, no.” Honesty was the best policy, wasn’t it? Petri hardly looked offended.

“Then your only duty to me is as my apprentice.”

“Okay, but still, shouldn’t everybody know how to do ‘servant’s work?’ What if they haven’t got servants?” Harry said, not ready to back down from the argument. Petri was obviously in a good mood, because he tolerated the debate with a sanguine expression and took another bite of his biscuit.

“I never said that household charms are not valuable, only that you seem to be unduly interested in them,” he said. Harry reviewed the conversation and discovered that he had already forgotten what they had started out talking about, and could not contradict that claim.

The tea set landed with a rattle on the one empty spot left on the table, and the kettle poured two cups.

“Thank you, Rosenkol,” said Petri, taking a cup, though he was still looking thoughtfully at Harry. “I should not be so hard on you, I suppose. You are right to respect Rosenkol. So many wizards treat their house elves too poorly.”

“But why?” Harry asked. “Surely a ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ now and then isn’t hard.” Not to mention refraining from horrible torture. He bit his lip.

“People conflate inferiority with worthlessness. They think those beneath them are rubbish, and those above them are gods. It’s a foolish, bestial way of thought. In reality there is always room to rise or fall,” Petri said.

Harry nodded, unable to find fault with this statement, even though something still felt wrong. He sipped his tea and nibbled on a scone. They really weren’t half bad.

It wasn’t the logic that was the problem, he thought. No… Harry mustered up his thoughts and went for another round. “What makes someone inferior or superior? Isn’t everyone good at some things and bad at others?”

Petri’s wand was in his hand and pointed at Harry before he could even blink, its tip glowing a threatening, cruciatus red. Harry inhaled a bit of scone and doubled over in a coughing fit, his head still awkwardly raised to track the threat. But Petri laughed quietly, and the spell did not leave his wand. Harry took a resentful swig of tea to clear his throat.

“I get it,” he muttered, coughing a few more times than strictly necessary.

“Not only power, but the willingness to use it,” Petri clarified. “As I mentioned, love can make even the powerful weak.”

“You make love sound like a bad thing,” Harry said. Trust a dark wizard to pervert all that was good. Petri snorted.

“Do I?” he said. “I haven’t said anything about good or bad. We are talking about hierarchy.”

“Sorry,” Harry said, chastened. “So you mean, weakness isn’t good or bad?”

Harry wasn’t sure what to think. On the one hand, he didn’t want to be so easily threatened by Petri’s wand. On the other, he still remembered what the Dark Lord had said about power being dominion over other people. Harry didn’t want to be better than others, he just didn’t want to be at their mercy.

“It’s simply unavoidable. There will always be someone more powerful than you,” Petri said.

“Even if you’re the Dark Lord?” Harry countered. Petri sighed.

“Even the Dark Lord is not invincible,” he said, giving Harry a meaningful look.

“That doesn’t count,” Harry protested. “He—he was a spirit, or something, and still stronger than me now. Whatever happened when I was a baby was a fluke.”

“I’m sure the Dark Lord was eager to convince you of that,” Petri said. Harry saw his point, but found it unpersuasive.

“You’re the one who told me to do whatever he wanted,” he pointed out, suddenly angry. Had he put too much stock into Petri’s advice? What if he could have stopped the Dark Lord from getting the philosopher’s stone after all?

“I’ve been thinking,” Petri said, ignoring Harry’s tone, “The Dark Lord’s interest in you makes no sense. At first, he would have naturally been curious about whether there was something special about you. If there was not, he should have forgotten the matter, or if there was, perhaps he would have made another attempt on your life. To use you as he did, to help him… a risky choice. Tell me, what do you think of the Dark Lord, after meeting him?”

Harry did not like that question at all. “What do _you_ think of him?” he shot back.

Petri did not hex him, thankfully, and only sighed. “Fortunately, we have never met. I imagine we would disagree on some crucial points, and then he would be forced to kill me.”

“What, really? Like what?” Harry was thrown, having thought this whole time that Petri, a dark wizard, would naturally follow the Dark Lord.

“The dark arts and their place in society, for one. The Dark Lord wants everybody to learn the dark arts—not just the dark arts, but all forms of magic. Wizards, beasts, creatures, he does not care, they are all the same to him. The strongest will naturally rise to the top and the weak will perish. He does not care about the good of our society, about order or tradition, he wants, simply, meritocracy. In the end, that’s not much different from anarchy,” Petri said.

“So you _don’t_ want everyone to learn dark arts?” Harry asked.

“Of course not,” Petri cried. “The dark arts are highly dangerous, especially in the hands of fools and incompetents. It takes years of study to master them, yet they are so easy to simply use and abuse—I would never think it a good idea to allow just anybody to practise them. Don’t you remember? That possessed professor of yours was showing you deadly curses without teaching you anything about them—that exemplifies the Dark Lord’s ridiculous philosophy. You haven’t been casting them any more, have you?”

Petri gave him a searching look.

“I haven’t,” Harry said honestly. “He tried to teach me this obscure curse that I couldn’t do, before Christmas, and then after that we stopped meeting. Er, until he—the Dark Lord—possessed me.”

“What curse?” Petri asked.

“The, er, protection of blood?” Harry said, struggling to recall the name. Petri’s eyes sharpened in recognition.

“Why that charm?” he wondered aloud. “It’s exceedingly useless unless cast as an enchantment, and even then… mostly an academic curiosity.”

Harry shrugged. “He was pretending to help me defend myself against Silviu at the time. He said it, er, would stop him from using sympathetic magic?”

Petri laughed incredulously. “Surely you realise how ridiculous that is? You’re an orphan, last of your line,” he said. “There’s no bloodline for the charm to protect.”

“There’s Aunt Petunia,” Harry protested. Petri looked at him blankly. “My muggle aunt. The one I used to live with. Er, do muggles count?”

“Muggles count,” Petri muttered, his brows furrowing. “I never asked, but why the devil were you living with muggles? Surely there were wizards lining up to adopt you, survivor of the Dark Lord?”

“Er, well, Aunt Petunia is my family,” he said. Not that she’d ever acted like it.

“You were obviously unhappy there. I remember what you told me about how those filthy muggles treated you, and you’ve never once expressed that you’d like to return to them,” Petri pointed out. He gracefully left out part where he had kidnapped Harry, and left him with little choice.

Harry hesitated for a moment, and then said, “Good riddance. You’re right. It was awful there. She hated me.”

He realised, dismally, that Petri treated his house elf better than Aunt Petunia had ever treated him.

Petri also seemed to have some kind of epiphany. “Arabella lives down the street from those muggles,” he said.

It took Harry a moment to place who Petri was talking about. “Mrs Figg? Yeah.”

“Dumbledore gave her that house, a decade ago, it must have been,” Petri muttered, half to himself. “You knew Arabella, didn’t you? You said she would watch you?”

“Er, yeah,” Harry said. “When the Dursleys—my relatives, were out.”

“She never mentioned anything,” Petri said. “But why would she? It wasn’t relevant. Perhaps we should just ask.”

He waved his wand in a distracted circle and a piece of parchment slipped out from underneath a plate of biscuits and zoomed into his hand. He colour-changed words onto the parchment and charmed it to fold itself, which Harry thought was excessively lazy.

“Rosenkol, deliver this to Arabella,” he ordered, tossing the note to the elf. “Wait for a reply.”

“Right away, Master,” said Rosenkol, vanishing with a pop.

“What did you ask her?” Harry asked, feeling lost.

“I asked her to come for dinner tomorrow,” he said. “There’s something strange about all this. I think Dumbledore must have placed her there specifically to watch over you. But why? She’s a squib; she wasn’t going to be protecting you from anything. Nor did she teach you about magic—you thought she was a muggle, right?”

Harry nodded.

“So Dumbledore was interested in observing you, for some reason, and the Dark Lord was also interested…”

This line of thought reminded Harry of something that he wasn’t sure he should bring up. He hesitated for a few moments before curiosity overwhelmed caution.

“The Dark Lord said something, that he intended to kill me when I was a baby, me specifically, and not my parents, and I asked Dumbledore about it and he knew why but he said he couldn’t tell me. Because grammatica,” Harry said.

“You said the Dark Lord taught you arithmancy?” Petri demanded, as if that were the most salient thing he’d revealed.

“Er, not exactly. He just told me some things about it, er, mostly grammatology, and I read some of the textbook,” Harry said.

“I see… For future reference, if hearing about something is grammatica, then that something must be a prophecy,” Petri said, grimacing. “Why am I surprised? That explains everything.”

“What, how?” Harry asked.

“It’s called the fateful word effect, but really it’s the same concept as any other grammatica. What did the Dark Lord tell you grammatica was?” Petri asked.

Harry felt a twinge of nervousness, as if he were about to get an answer wrong in a lesson, which was silly. “He said it’s when you use words to influence other people’s magic.”

Petri nodded, so Harry supposed the Dark Lord had taught him the truth after all.

“Yes, that’s the general concept. It’s called a fateful word if it’s spoken divination, such as a tarot reading by somebody with a clear inner eye,” Petri explained.

“Inner eye?” Harry asked. “Is that the same thing as, er, a talent for divination?”

“I wouldn’t call it a talent, exactly. It's more like a suitable attitude,” Petri said.

“Really? The Dark Lord made it sound innate—he told me he couldn’t do it,” Harry said. “He said only one in two people could.”

“It isn’t innate, but it’s not something that’s easily changed,” Petri said. “One in two is generous. Perhaps one in two can do general readings, but only one in ten will make precise predictions. But it is possible to improve.”

“How?” Harry asked.

“Something more easily said than done,” said Petri. “You have to accept fate, accept what you learn unconditionally. If you have even the faintest hopes or fears for the future, then your inner eye will be clouded and you will simply see what you want to see, rather than the truth. People with strong ambitions, people like the Dark Lord, would find it difficult to think like this, I suppose.”

“Oh,” Harry mumbled. “That makes sense. So what’s special about a prophecy?”

He knew what the word meant, non-technically—a prediction. But Petri was obviously referring to something specific.

“A prophecy is a sort of… spontaneous message,” Petri said. He looked uncomfortable. “Usually it’s a warning or a threat. Normally, when you divine, you’re asking for some information, but a prophecy isn’t something you asked for, you simply receive it whether you want it or not. The information is always about something influential that affects the fates of many people, so usually it’s only important people in society, leaders or kings, who receive them.”

“And you think Dumbledore got one?” Harry asked.

“You said he told you it would be grammatica to tell you why the Dark Lord tried to kill you?” Petri asked.

“Er, he didn’t say that explicitly,” Harry said, wondering if he had just jumped to conclusions and was accidentally blowing everything out of proportion. “He told me something like, he thought he shouldn’t tell me, and that I shouldn’t try to find out.”

That sounded really lame, now that he had said it out loud.

“Hmm,” said Petri. “Perhaps he just thought you were too young to hear whatever it was. But that doesn’t explain the Dark Lord’s interest. Some kind of prophecy involving you and him _would_ make sense.”

“Wait. If it was Dumbledore’s prophecy, wouldn’t it be about him?” Harry asked.

“It would be relevant to him, yes, but not necessarily about him,” Petri corrected. “Dumbledore would certainly have been interested in the Dark Lord’s fate.”

“How do you know he didn’t just do, er, regular divination?” Harry asked.

“If it’s true that he did not tell you to avoid doing grammatica, then it must have been a prophecy, because no other fateful word can be transferred like that, as far as anybody knows,” Petri explained. “If I do a tarot reading for you, your future will be influenced, but if you tell someone else about the reading, even if somebody views the memory of it, it won’t have a further effect. Prophecy isn’t like that. It stays active, and the more people hear it, the stronger its effect.”

“Er, that’s kind of scary,” Harry said. “So I guess it’s good that he didn’t tell me, then.”

Petri grimaced. “It’s difficult to say. If there is a prophecy, then it’s probably already in effect, and your possible future is already restricted. At a certain point, it might be better to know, even if that cuts the possibilities down even more.”

“Yesterday you mentioned I could try to see my fate, like you did, didn’t you?” Harry asked, reminded of their cryptic conversation about choices the evening before.

“You can try,” Petri said. “Are you finished with your tea?”

Harry blinked at this non sequitur and glanced briefly into his teacup. There were only some soggy dregs remaining.

“Er, yeah,” he said.

“Bring the teacup,” Petri said, leaving his own cup on the table and striding over to the trunk. Harry followed him, resisting the urge to ask annoying questions that he supposed would be answered soon enough.

They passed through the blood door and the hexagonal antechamber, emerging in Petri’s workroom.

“Have you studied divination at all in school yet?” Petri asked.

“Er, no,” said Harry. “I think it’s an elective, for third year.”

“No wonder you’re so eager. Telling the future is like asking questions to a dog,” Petri said. “It won’t lie to you, but its answers will be basically incomprehensible. All these things,” He waved his wand at the top row of cabinets and summoned some of their contents to the table—crystal balls in various colours, a deck of cards, a human skull with a pipe coming out of it, and a bunch of twigs tied together with a string—“all these things are tools to help translate that answer. Hopefully some combination of them will work for you.”

“Er, okay. So what do I do?” Harry asked. Petri summoned a book and opened it up to an apparently random page with a flick of his wand. He covered up something with his hand and then beckoned for Harry to come closer.

“Look at these symbols,” he said, indicating the left half of the page.

Harry saw some fairly basic drawings—a sun, a leaf, a cross, a sailboat, a dog, and a heart.

“Now look for one of these in your teacup,” Petri said. Harry peered up at him sceptically but he was completely serious, so Harry looked. To his surprise, he immediately identified a rather lumpy four-legged figure with menacing jaws looming against the pale porcelain.

“Looks like the dog,” he said.

“Hmm,” said Petri, sounding vaguely pleased. He uncovered the book and read, “The Grim is an omen of untimely death. Apart from physical death, it may symbolize an unexpected end to a relationship or the passing of an important opportunity. As we are interested in your fate, I would take it that we’ve found your literal death. A good start.”

Harry wouldn’t call dying a good start by any means. “Er, so I’m going to die young?” he asked. For some reason, he felt rather indifferent to the prospect, even though he was trying his best to take everything seriously.

“In the majority of possible futures, you die unnaturally,” Petri corrected. “Let’s move on. Show me your cup. _Aguamenti_. _Relashio._ ”

Petri returned the cup, now filled and steaming.

“While you wait for the tea to steep, tell me what you think of what you just saw,” he said.

Harry blinked. “Er, that's sort of a rubbish future, I suppose.”

“Hmm. What else would you like to know?” Petri asked.

“When I’ll die?” Harry said.

“Drink your tea,” said Petri, nodding. The tea was still too scalding to drink. so he swirled it around a bit and then sipped at it cautiously. Eventually, when there were just the dregs left again, Harry scrutinised them for another shape. There was a somewhat pointed blob in the centre, with some missing bits.

“I think it’s a leaf,” he said.

Petri read from the book again. “The leaf symbolises springtime and youth. It may be a signal that something will happen early, or that new experiences await.”

“I’m going to die young,” Harry said again, a little vindicated.

Petri hummed again. “You seem very interested in dying young,” he said.

“What? No,” Harry denied. “That’s just literally what the book is saying.”

“Perhaps,” Petri allowed, obviously not convinced. “Let’s try the place of death. I hope you have no preconceived notions about that.”

Harry shook his head. Petri refilled his cup, and he had the feeling that he was going to be drinking an unfortunate amount of weak tea today.

He finished off his third cup, his stomach feeling rather sloshy. “Er, I really can’t tell what this is. Maybe the sun? But it’s pretty vague.” He showed Petri the cup.

“Nothing,” Petri agreed. “That suggests that there really are many possible deaths, in a variety of places. What do you think of that?”

Harry considered the information that he was likely to die young no matter where he was, and had to conclude that the only way that made sense was if somebody was trying very intentionally to kill him. “I’m going to be—possibly going to be murdered,” he said. “By the Dark Lord, do you think?”

“I would normally say not to guess too far ahead,” Petri said, “but in this case that seems likely, yes.”

“So it’s a possible future, or many possible ones. So er, how do I avoid that?” Harry asked. “There’s a way, right? You said you could choose.”

Petri nodded. “That is the difficult part. I recommend that you do more general divination first to gather more information.”

“I’m feeling a bit sick from drinking so much tea,” Harry protested.

“Try the crystals,” Petri suggested. He flipped through his book. “Look for one of these in the blue crystal.”

There were new symbols on the page—a snowflake, a bird, a diagonal cross, a wand, a diamond, and a spiral.

“How does this work, anyway?” Harry asked, unable to make heads or tails of the apparently random images.

“As I said, you are trying to decipher that which your inner eye sees. This is a book of symbolism sets. Using a random set helps you avoid wishful thinking, but even then you may still see what you want to see instead of what truly is, or misinterpret the sign,” Petri explained. “It’s best if you try to forget what you learned from the tessomancy. The tea reading.”

“What about the memory charm?” Harry suggested again. “Then I’ll actually forget.”

“It’s a good idea, in principle,” Petri said. “I haven’t heard of it being done before. If you’re willing, then we can try it.” He opened one of the large cabinets and took out his pensieve.

Mist swirled, and Harry gasped as he was ejected from the memory. He rubbed at his forehead, finding it deeply disturbing to see himself and Petri almost exactly as they were now, but to have absolutely no episodic memory of it.

Petri looked up from the book he was reading. “Next one?” he asked.

Harry nodded, eyeing the phials of silvery memory resting in a row on the table. They had apparently done this five times. He used his wand to scoop the first memory back out and then poured the second one. Taking a deep breath, though it was unnecessary, he plunged back into the pensieve.

He remembered blacking out after entering the trunk, and then waking up to read a note from himself, in his own hand, about what they were doing. He had been slightly distrustful of Petri for a moment after immediately blacking out again, but the first trip into the pensieve had convinced him that nothing untoward had happened, and that the whole thing had been his own idea in the first place.

This second memory must have taken place just after he read his note. Fortunately, he had thought to write down some information about symbol sets and divination there, because the second time around, Petri was noticeably reticent and unhelpful. Harry supposed he hadn’t wanted to influence the results.

“I see a wand, I think,” said Harry in the memory, peering intently into a fist-sized, pale blue crystal ball. Harry stepped closer so that he could see what his past self had learned. There was a weakly shimmering light in the crystal, concentrated in a single, somewhat wavering beam.

“The wand symbolises power and challenge. It signals difficult times and conflict ahead, which must be overcome if the subject is to succeed,” Petri read.

“This is about how I’ll die, right? Maybe I’ll be killed in a duel. Or if I win, I suppose that means I won’t die?” Harry speculated.

Petri remained stone faced and did not say anything when Harry looked to him, except, “Write it down, and then let’s move on to your next question.”

“Who’s going to duel me?” Harry asked, to present-Harry’s surprise. He had expected himself to ask the same questions each time, but he supposed the first thing he saw must have influenced him more than he would have thought.

“I see a wand again. Are you sure this is working?” past-Harry asked.

“If you see the wand, then the wand is the best answer to your question,” Petri said. “Would you like me to read the entry again?”

“No, it’s fine,” said Harry. “Difficulty and conflict? So it’s an enemy I’m duelling. I mean I suppose that’s kind of obvious… not like a friend is going to be duelling me to kill. But that doesn’t really tell me who it is. It could be anyone…”

Having seen the first memory, Harry admitted to himself that his mind had immediately leapt to Lord Voldemort, but he could also understand how, without the tessomancy results, he might be confused as to the meaning of the crystal gazing. His enemy list intersected dismally much with his friends list—Petri, Silviu, the Dark Lord, Dumbledore—any of them could be either one. They were all also definitely capable of killing him in a duel. Dumbledore, perhaps not, as he didn’t seem the murdering type, but Harry also knew him the least well. With the right motivation, perhaps…

Harry in the memory seemed to be thinking along the same lines, because he said, “Why are they duelling me? That’s a better question.”

Harry half expected to see the unhelpful wand again, but the light in the crystal warped and shuddered, spreading out and multiplying into a complex geometric form.

“Snowflake,” said Harry in the memory.

“The snowflake represents winter, the inevitable end of an era, the completion of a cycle. Winter may bring death, but more often it means sleep, at the end of which comes spring, the reawakening of life,” Petri obligingly read. He frowned, breaking his indifferent facade.

“The reason someone is duelling me is to… finish something? It can’t be reawakening if I’m dead,” Harry muttered.

“The completion of a cycle—it may also mean that they are doing it because it is fated,” Petri said. Harry looked surprised at this contribution.

“What does that mean, doing something because it’s fated? Fate means that’s how it will happen. But it’s not the reason why it happens. Isn’t that circular?” he asked.

“It’s circular, but possible,” Petri said. “What you are doing now is trying to learn your fate. If you do anything because of what you learn, is that not, in some way, acting because of fate?”

“What, so you mean I find out I’m supposed to duel this person, and they did divination and found out the same thing, and we end up duelling to the death for no reason?” Harry demanded. “That’s completely mad.”

“It’s completely rational,” Petri averred. “If you are fated to duel to the death, would you not rather duel on your own terms? Your opponent will think the same thing, and strive to strike first. The outcome is precisely in line with fate.”

“But it would be better if we never duelled at all!” Harry protested. “Just, agreed to ignore each other and forget about fate. Obliviated ourselves.”

“You’re right in theory of course, but it is never that simple in reality. For you to divine a fate means that it is probable, not only possible. Perhaps if you lose that knowledge, forget it, then the probability of it coming to pass will fall. But will it fall enough? It’s impossible for you to know what would happen if you did not know. You might very well die in this duel anyway, unprepared,” Petri concluded.

Harry’s jaw dropped, past and present.

“This is cruel,” said past-Harry, staring at the crystal. No matter how long he looked, the light remained in its frozen lattice.

Present-Harry was occupied with another matter, two thoughts that were chasing each other around his skull: “The opponent is Lord Voldemort” and “he would strive to strike first.”

Intending to kill Harry as a baby. A miscalculation. It just fit too well—Lord Voldemort must have known about this fate, known about it before Harry was even born, perhaps.

He shook his head as the memory ended. It was too early to jump to conclusions. He understood now why attempting to divine anything less vague than the arbitrary symbol set would be an exercise in futility. Even with such ambiguous results, his mind was already filling in details at an alarming rate. How could he possibly see past his expectations to the truth?

Harry groaned, and Petri gave him a knowing look and passed him the third memory.

They used the skull in the third attempt. Petri explained that the skull belonged to Aleksandra, Harry’s predecessor, and that she would be happy to send them visions. He lit a short candle and placed it in the cavern, which made an eerie, flickering glow emerge from the eye-holes, and an unexpected amount of smoke began to waft from the pipe sticking out of the top.

“You have to inhale the smoke, and then expel it,” Petri explained. He demonstrated briefly, and Harry saw a surprisingly coherent, if not comprehensible, scene played out in smoky figures—a contingent of red-robed aurors, a great plume of black smoke shooting into the sky, and then the ocean, choppy and beset by a storm, with the vague outline of an island in the distance.

Harry tried to do the same thing, and of course started hacking and sputtering everywhere, but it was enough to release the smoke. It billowed out and Harry glimpsed a forest clearing full of robed and masked figures, and a flash of green light—then a graveyard, and green light again, but then it flared golden for some reason—a cavernous room with smooth marble floors, and again the golden light—scene after scene, but always spellfire, and the light.

“I’m going to die by a golden light,” Harry mumbled as he finally recovered from his coughing fit. He glanced to Petri, who seemed equally at a loss.

“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” he said.

Present-Harry thought that the light was maybe not the salient part, but the duelling. In the first vision, there hadn’t been duelling, and there hadn’t been golden light, only the unforgettable colour of the killing curse. Surely that meant that Harry was dead in that vision, whereas in the others, something else had happened. Whatever that light was, he didn’t think it was deadly, and it had something to do with the duelling.

“How come it can’t show something that makes more sense?” Harry grumbled.

“You cannot see a future that would not take place if you knew of it,” Petri said. “Be grateful. A detailed fate is an unavoidable one.”

Harry groaned into the mist.

In the fourth memory, they used the bundle of sticks, which Harry simply took in hand and hurled at the ground. They scattered satisfyingly across the wooden floor.

“How many crossings?” Petri asked, holding a small book in his hand.

Harry counted, and then counted again, just in case. “Seven.”

Petri grimaced. “Crossings represent the importance of your fate to the fate of others. Seven is the most powerful number, which means your fate influences a great many people.”

“How?” Harry demanded. “I don’t even know that many people!”

Petri did not answer, and only said, “How many uncrossed sticks?”

“None,” Harry mumbled.

“Uncrossed sticks represent the importance of others’ fates to yours. Zero is invisibility, or the closed cycle. It suggests that anybody capable of influencing your fate is also influenced by it.”

“That’s not helpful since you just said my fate influences loads of people,” Harry muttered.

“How many separate groups of sticks?” Petri asked. Harry stared at him blankly, so he pointed with his fingers and indicated the disconnected shapes. “One, two, three. The driving force of your fate is a conflict of powerful ideals.”

Both past and present Harry were rather lost at this point.

“Finally, how many closed shapes? Just one. Your fate can be thwarted through unity and purity,” Petri finished, and snapped the book shut.

“I didn’t understand any of that,” Harry complained, though he had written down Petri’s commentary verbatim.

“Xylomancy is very rigid, and thus imprecise,” Petri said.

Present-Harry thought that the xylomancy results made some sense, in light of the other things he had seen. It seemed more and more like there was just one central figure in his fate—his would-be murderer, his duelling opponent, the one who influenced and would be influenced by his fate, and whose fate would affect many others—all these things pointed to Lord Voldemort.

There was just one final memory left. Harry guessed that they had used the tarot cards.

He was right. For this one, Petri sat down across from Harry, picked up the deck, and began shuffling it methodically.

“You cannot give yourself fateful words, so I will read for you,” Petri told him.

Harry nodded, taking his word for it.

“Make notes on what I say,” he said, beginning to deal cards without any pomp or circumstance. Somehow, Harry had thought getting his fortune told would be more mystical than this. He readied his quill.

When Petri had dealt seven cards face up in a column, he glanced over them once and then began to speak, pointing to the cards.

“Your enemy—an enemy of your past—will be renewed. Your friends… choice and change. You must choose to keep your friends or abandon them for their actions.”

Harry shifted uneasily as he marked the full stop. Present-Harry was surprised at how specific and understandable the reading was compared to all the prior methods. Perhaps his expectations had got lower after being frustrated by too much vagueness.

Petri dealt seven more cards to the left of the first column. His eyebrows rose.

“Disaster is likely, but distant. Your death… pivotal. The status quo will be saved.”

Harry really did not like how this sounded. Petri dealt cards again.

“A deep desire of yours will be attained unexpectedly. Judgement—guilt will destroy your life.”

“What?” Harry demanded, pale.

“We will speak after you’ve reminded yourself of all the results,” Petri said.

Mist brought Harry back to reality.

“My future is depressing,” he concluded. Petri looked worried, which did not reassure him.

“I have thought about what we saw today, but I want you to draw your own conclusions first,” he said.

Harry collected up all the parchments with the notes he had made and tried to consolidate them all into one narrative.

“It seems like everything points to the Dark Lord as the most important person for my fate. We’ll be in conflict somehow, maybe a duel, but I don’t know if the duelling is literal. But…” Harry thought about the second memory, the snowflake in the crystal. “It seems like there’s no actual reason for the conflict. Also a lot of other people will be affected, but that makes sense because didn’t the Dark Lord practically start a war last time?”

Even as Harry said all this, his eyes refused to leave the last line from the tarot reading. A deep desire of his—that could refer to none other than the resurrection of his parents that he had seen in the golden mirror. So the mirror really did show the future, or some version of it. But why would guilt destroy his life? Would he have to do something terrible to bring his parents back? It was very possible, knowing the sorts of ingredients that were commonly used for enchanting the dead, and it scared him that the thought did not dissuade him.

“Yes. I am more and more certain that there really is a prophecy,” Petri said. “Your fate is extremely convergent, as if your death is imminent, but there were no signs of urgency, not even in the cards. In fact, the cards tell us that death is distant, at least many years away. I can’t think of any other way for a future to be so predictable than that everybody involved already knows about it. I pulled twenty-one cards and there were _twelve_ major arcana, twelve.”

“Is that bad?” Harry asked. “Er, how do the cards work, anyway?”

“There are twenty-two major arcana in total, out of seventy-eight cards in the deck. Twelve in one reading is extremely many. They represent important, life-changing events,” Petri explained. “I suppose it must be right. The Dark Lord will soon be restored by the philosopher’s stone, we are sure of that much. He will be gathering his following, and we will all have to decide our loyalties.”

“So what do I do?” Harry asked, half afraid that Petri would have no answer.

But he did. “You must choose, now that you have seen the options,” he said.

“What options? Die, or die?” Harry demanded. Petri sighed and ran his fingers through his hair.

“Everybody dies—that’s fate. You are fated to die at the hand of the Dark Lord, as are many. If you cannot accept your fate, then we can proceed no further,” he said harshly.

Harry felt his ears burning in frustration, but he thought he understood Petri’s point. He was focusing too much on the part that seemingly could not be changed, rather than the parts that were still more than vague enough to present possibilities.

“I want to die later then, as late as possible,” he said.

“Which divining medium did you prefer?” Petri asked. Harry considered the question. The tea leaves were out. His stomach was still sloshing. The skull had also looked unpleasant.

“Er, the cards made the most sense, but you said I couldn’t read myself?” he said.

“You cannot tell your own future effectively, but you can certainly ask for guidance,” Petri said. “It’s much more difficult than any of the general divination we did today. You will have to consult the cards daily to familiarise yourself with them. I also recommend writing down all your dreams.”

“My dreams? Why?” Harry asked. It was true that his dreams sometimes contained vague hints about what kind of day he was about to have, but he had always chalked it up to coincidence.

“The dead inhabit the space of dreams, and sometimes they can even communicate information through them,” Petri explained.

“So, there really is an afterlife?” Harry asked. “Confirmed?”

Petri snorted. “There’s nothing confirmed about it. At best, death will be just like a dream from which you can never wake. At worst, these impressions of the dead are nothing more than figments of memory from the living. Regardless, when you die, you’re gone. If somebody conjures you, some version of you might enjoy a few moments of false life. That’s all.”

He spoke with such bitterness that Harry could not find it in himself to argue.

But Petri had to be wrong, because the fateful words he had told Harry, about the achievement of his desire, meant that true resurrection really was possible. And how could it be possible if the dead were figments, and not real?


	36. Herald

There were seventy-eight cards in a tarot deck, as Petri had mentioned. At the time, Harry hadn't thought much of it, but later when Petri took him to the Starry Prophesier to build his own deck, it became clear that those were seventy-eight times two (upright and reversed) meanings that he would need to memorise like the back of his hand.

It did not help that Petri refused to give him a straight answer about what any of the cards were.

"It's your deck," he would say. "You can interpret it however you like, as long as it's consistent."

Harry liked the lack of prescription, but he would have appreciated at least a starting point.

The lady at the Starry Prophesier, on the other hand, had a bit too much say to about the cards.

She was extremely tall, towering over Petri, and wore needle-thin high heels that made her even taller. It looked like somebody had robbed an upholstery shop and dumped it all over her—she was covered in ugly shawls and heavy sashes. When they entered the cramped shop, she tittered in a high voice and prowled out from behind her ostentatiously sequinned booth to meet them.

"Hello darlings, here to discover yourselves? Find your soulmate?" she asked, batting her eyelashes at Petri and stroking her long, chestnut hair. Harry fought the urge to gag. What was she doing? Petri was like, seventy years old.

Harry glanced up and was relieved to see that he looked equally nonplussed.

"Vlaicu referred us here," Petri said stiffly. "He said you sell divination supplies."

"Oh, Silviu sent you?" she said, her tone drastically altered, so that she almost sounded like a normal person. "And who might you two be? My name is Augustina Selene, the Starry Prophesier."

"Jochen Peters," said Petri. "This is my apprentice, Harry."

" _The_ Harry?" Augustina asked, arching one thin eyebrow, "Not Silviu's protégé?"

"Er, I'm in the company, but I wouldn't call myself, er… that," Harry mumbled. Petri didn't look visibly offended at the notion, but neither did he relax the hard lines of his shoulders.

"Well don't just stand in the door like that, come in, come in," Augustina said, beckoning them further into the shop, past a thick velvet curtain that smelled strongly of incense. "What was it you were looking for today?"

The back area was fortunately less saturated in gaudy fabrics and heavy perfumes, and instead had the musty ambiance of a library with only the faintest touch of smoke.

"Tarot cards," Petri said. "Harry is building his first deck."

"Oh how wonderful!" Augustina cried, "Tarot is my favourite. The cards can tell you so much about a person. Here, my collection, all hand-painted."

Harry approached the indicated shelf a little hesitantly, ducking under Augustina's outstretched hand, and perused the display.

Petri had educated him somewhat on the structure of the deck before their excursion—there were twenty-two major arcana, which were the cards he was here today to select, and then four suits of minor arcana. The minor arcana were usually written in runic numbers, and it was best if he created them himself, but fortunately he wasn't expected to have enough artistic talent to personally render the major arcana.

"Death is my favourite card," Augustina told Harry. She snatched the skull artwork between her middle and index finger and held it out to him. "I love explaining it to my clients—it might be a skull but it doesn't mean you're going to die! An end to one thing is just the beginning of another. Death to a bad relationship means an opportunity to meet your true love!"

Harry frowned. In his experience, death was death. He took the card. It definitely looked like death to him.

"What's this one?" he asked, pointing to a fat man in overflowing red robes, wreathed by the shining sun.

"That's the Hierophant," Augustina said. Harry frowned. He didn't remember that one. "It stands for tradition and stability. And commitment, which is often what's missing in lacklustre relationships."

"That's a muggle card," Petri interjected, frowning.

"Muggle, wizard, I've got them all," Augustina said, waving her hand. "Don't you worry."

"What's the difference?" Harry asked.

Petri looked like he wanted to say something derogatory, but he restrained himself and muttered, "Convention."

Harry stuck to the wizarding arcana anyway. It turned out that there were significant differences, which made sense, since muggles wouldn't have cards like the Dementor and the Fountain of Fair Fortune.

Petri parted with twenty-two sickles, which seemed shockingly excessive for some cards, and then power-walked out of the shop, Harry jogging after him.

"That woman was such a hack," Petri complained as soon as they passed the threshold. "She's probably not even a witch, knowing the sort of rabble Vlaicu keeps around."

"But the cards are real?" Harry checked.

"They're cards," said Petri. "Nothing magical about them."

"Why were they so expensive then?" Harry demanded. Petri stopped and turned to smile wryly at him.

"It's important that your tarot cards mean something to you," he said.

Probably, Harry figured, Petri just wanted to have an excuse to curse him if he ended up losing interest. Reading tarot for a quarter hour daily would be a non-trivial addition to his schedule.

He wanted to start immediately, but they had to get ready to go to Mrs Figg's. Harry had spotted her reply to Petri's note lying about on the table the previous night, and had had to stifle his snickering with his robes. It had been something like:

_Dear Joachim,_

_Merlin knows what kind of hovel you consider it fit to live in, and don't get me started on what you call "food." I will be expecting you at my house tomorrow at six o'clock._

_Yours,_

_Arabella_

They apparated to Wisteria Walk at six sharp and found Mrs Figg already waiting for them on the porch, enjoying the warm evening air with her cats. She waved at them cheerfully.

"Arabella, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to impose myself on you," Petri said to her immediately as they approached. "I thought…"

"Shush," said Mrs Figg, "You're doing me a favour. I need some sensible company once in a while, or I'll go batty. You're welcome to drop by anytime. You too, Harry. It's good to see you again—you've grown quite a bit."

As usual, Harry was not sure how to respond to Mrs Figg's words. She had a grandmotherly air about her, and that included the ability to carry on a conversation about him with herself.

Petri seemed to have no trouble. "I wish it was just a social call, but I did want to speak to you about something important."

"Of course, of course," said Mrs Figg, waving her hand dismissively. "I know you're always about your business, Joachim. Go on."

Petri hesitated and looked around, as if expecting to find a pack of eavesdropping muggles. The neighbourhood was silent except for the chattering of sparrows.

"It's about Harry Potter," he said. Mrs Figg leaned forward suddenly, sending a cat tumbling out of her lap. It yowled angrily and puffed up, before darting off into a shadowy corner.

"Joachim, please, please tell me you didn't _do_ something," she whispered. "I'll have to tell Albus."

"Dumbledore knows what I've done," said Petri. "But I didn't realise you had anything to do with it. Was that why he sent you to live here? So that you could watch over Harry Potter?"

Mrs Figg gave an unhappy nod. "So what happened to him? Is he… all right?"

"He's perfectly fine," Petri said without looking at Harry. Mrs Figg relaxed a little at that, obviously trusting Petri's word. "What I don't understand—what _he_ doesn't understand, and would like to know, is why Dumbledore needed you to be here."

"Can I see him?" Mrs Figg asked. "Harry?"

Petri turned to Harry and raised an eyebrow. Harry shrugged. He didn't have an opinion on Mrs Figg learning his identity either way. She had never been particularly bad or good to him, and she was a squib who probably couldn't murder him very easily.

"Let's go inside," Petri suggested. "I don't want to do anything where muggles could see."

"You've charms for it," said Mrs Figg. Petri sighed and took out his wand, sweeping it in an arc toward the front garden and muttering a rhythmic incantation. A faint blue light settled on the lawn some distance from them, and then disappeared. He looked a little out of breath afterwards.

"I'm not taking it back down," he said. "Serves you right."

Mrs Figg snorted, looking quite smug for somebody who was helpless to fix whatever damage Petri had chosen to do.

"All the neighbours are nosy biddies anyway," she said. "Never liked them. Especially not Harry's relatives—those were the worst sort of muggles. Well," she paused to peer up at Petri apologetically, "not the absolute worst, but nearly. Now go on, do whatever it was you didn't want muggles to see."

Petri nodded. "Rosenkol!" he called, and the elf popped up in a sea of cats, which startled and lurched away from him as if magnetically repulsed.

Mrs Figg rolled her eyes. She patted her rocking chair firmly, and a large white cat that Harry recognised as the reanimated Mr Tibbles leapt up onto her lap and purred as she stroked it generously. Harry grudgingly admitted to himself that Petri had done a good job with it.

"Rosenkol, introduce Harry to Arabella," Petri said.

Rosenkol glanced up.

"Master is meaning to tell the secret?" he asked in a very loud whisper. Petri nodded. Mrs Figg peered at them all in mild confusion, until Rosenkol said, "Mistress Arabella, this is being Harry Potter."

Mrs Figg blinked rapidly, and understanding dawned on her face. She rounded on Petri.

"Joachim, you unimaginable twat, you've been hiding him this entire time?" she demanded. Petri didn't pretend to be cowed, but he did keep a stoic mien. Mrs Figg sighed and dragged a hand across her face, ruffling her wispy grey fringe. "Never mind, that's exactly like you. I'm so sorry, Harry." She stared at him searchingly, but did not seem to find what she was looking for. "I wish I could have told you everything, since the beginning, but Albus forbade it."

"It's fine," Harry said, surprisingly indifferent. He took the opportunity to ask something that had been niggling at him for a long time now. "But what does Dumbledore have to do with all this? With me and with you?" He glanced at Petri as well. What could make a dark wizard defer to a school headmaster, international authority or not? He knew that Petri only followed the law when it suited him.

Mrs Figg looked hesitant, but then she shook her head and muttered, "The kneazle's out of the bag anyway, I suppose. Albus asked me to keep an eye on you in case any dark wizards tried to get their hands on you. After You-Know-Who disappeared, it took a long while for them to apprehend all his followers and supporters. And who knows how many walked free? In the end, though, nobody worse than your nasty relatives ever showed their face around here."

Harry blinked and then glanced quickly over to Petri. Mrs Figg did know that he was a dark wizard too, right?

She continued, blithely, "Albus didn't want you to know about magic while you couldn't use it yet. Thought it would spoil your childhood."

This sounded totally ridiculous to Harry, and he was momentarily too affronted to respond.

Petri snorted. "Thought it would be a security risk, I'm sure," he corrected, and Harry deflated.

"So you work for him?" he asked Mrs Figg, trying to get at the source of his continued confusion. "He pays you?"

Mrs Figg and Petri burst into laughter at the same time. Harry didn't understand what was stupid about that question.

"When a wizard as powerful as Albus Dumbledore commands you, you obey," Petri said.

"You said the same thing about the Dark Lord," Harry protested. "But they're against each other, aren't they?"

"It's a choice, certainly. The Dark Lord will kill you for opposing him, but Dumbledore will destroy your life," Petri said.

"Joachim!" Mrs Figg admonished. "Albus has his flaws, but he's a good man."

"Für das größere Wohl," Petri said softly. "I did not say that he was not good."

Mrs Figg shook her head, shooing Mr Tibbles away and getting to her feet on creaky knees.

"Enough of that. Dinner is getting cold," she said. "Come on in."

"Wait, you still have not fully answered my original question," Petri protested, even as he followed her inside. Mrs Figg ignored him, ushering Harry past the door and rolling her eyes.

The hearty scent of warm cheese and herbs suffused the house, mixing oddly with the musty fragrance of cat. Mrs Figg sat them around the compact kitchen table and produced a large ceramic dish from the oven. Petri raised his wand to try to help, but Mrs Figg stopped him with a glare.

Dinner was chicken that melted in Harry's mouth and gnocchi and mushrooms with cheese—a little bland, but heavenly after a whole day of nothing but experimental biscuits. Petri complimented Mrs Figg generously.

"Still living on soldier rations, I suppose?" she asked him. Petri nodded with some chagrin. "Ghastly," Mrs Figg muttered. "I understood back then, but now?"

"Habit," Petri mumbled.

"And what about Harry? Is he feeding you proper food?" Mrs Figg asked.

Harry felt inexplicably safe from Petri's irritation in her house, and so he shook his head. "No. Nutritive potions mostly," he told her.

"Joachim, he's a growing boy!" Mrs Figg was scandalised. "Do you even know the first thing about raising a child?"

"No," Petri admitted unabashedly. "I see no point in coddling my apprentice. Harry is very mature for his age, yes?" He directed this comment at Harry himself.

"Er, I suppose, thanks," Harry mumbled into his gnocchi. It was true that Petri was perhaps the only adult who had never refused him something because he was "too young." Everybody else was always so focused on his age.

"You're ridiculous," Mrs Figg huffed. "I can't believe I have to say this, but Harry, you're welcome here anytime if you want to have a proper meal. Joachim, I'll have you know that those muggle relatives of his used to starve him. Do you really want to be like that?"

Petri actually flinched, but then held his ground: "I am not _starving_ anybody," he said. "There is nothing unhealthy about drinking nutritive potions. Their entire purpose is to provide adequate nutrition."

"Some people have a sense of taste," said Mrs Figg. Petri was silent.

"It's all right," Harry told her. "Rosenkol and I are learning to cook."

"Are you now?" said Mrs Figg. "That's wonderful. I could owl you some recipes later, if you'd like."

"Oh, thank you, that would be brilliant," Harry said. "Something simple, if you could." The only cookbook he had, _Witch's Brew_ , was mostly about culinary spellwork, not cooking itself, and the recipes that were included were all frustratingly complex.

They finished dinner, and Petri insisted on doing the dishes with magic. Harry was still astonished by how genuinely friendly he was with Mrs Figg, despite his professed disdain for squibs.

"All right, I know you're dying to ask more questions," Mrs Figg said as they retired to the parlour to enjoy some tea. She sat down on her armchair and gestured for them to take the sofa.

"I am!" Petri agreed, "What you said before only makes everything more mysterious. If Dumbledore was afraid that the Dark Lord's supporters would make attempts on Harry's life, why on earth would he have left the boy with defenceless muggles? And you? What are you supposed to do against dark wizards? Maul them with kneazles?"

"They're his relatives. You know how Albus is about family," Mrs Figg said, taking no offence. Petri shook his head.

"He knows better than anybody how worthless family is," he protested, "and so do you. Don't tell me you didn't try to wring an actual answer out of him."

"He told me my concerns were unwarranted and that he had put up protections for Harry," Mrs Figg said. "Although I'm not sure how true that is, given how easily you whisked him away from right underneath our noses."

Petri waved his hand. "Harry chose to come with me," he said. "That would have rendered the majority of protective enchantments useless. But I don't understand what kind of protections you could put on a muggle house that wouldn't be better on a wizard's. No unplottability, no _fidelius_ charm, or are there?"

Mrs Figg shook her head.

"What's left then?" Petri asked, throwing his hands up.

"He mentioned that Harry's mother had done something to protect him, and that it was important he be placed with a relation," Mrs Figg offered.

Harry suddenly had a funny thought. "You don't think it could be the protection of blood?" he asked. What were the odds?

"That would not have done any good." said Petri. "It only works against sympathetic magic."

"Maybe a variant of it?" Harry suggested. If he had learned anything from his study of charms, it was that everything was a variant of something.

Petri frowned. "It's not impossible," he allowed. "But Arabella, it still doesn't make sense. Why did Dumbledore need you here if Harry was already protected? Surely if dark wizards arrived to slaughter the muggles it would be obvious enough?"

"He told me to watch for anything out of the ordinary," Mrs Figg said. "There's no good in finding out about an attack after the fact. What are you getting at, anyway? Has Dumbledore called on your debt?"

Petri sighed. "He has, and for Harry's benefit." He glanced briefly to a bewildered Harry. "I want to know why he would have such a heavy interest in a boy."

"The Boy-Who-Lived," Mrs Figg reminded them. "Defeater of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named."

"And, so? Does he expect another miracle?" Petri challenged.

"Perhaps he feels that he owes it to Harry to keep him safe," Mrs Figg said. Petri's eyebrows rose into his hairline. Harry thought he understood his incredulity—nothing about his life so far had been what he would call "safe."

"I see he has kept us both in the dark again," Petri finally said.

"Would you have done as he asked, if you had known everything then?" Mrs Figg asked, her knuckles whitening against her teacup. She took a deep drink, not taking her eyes off his face.

Petri's lips thinned. "I—probably not. Would you have?"

Mrs Figg smiled more grimly than Harry would have thought possible for a kindly old cat lady. "Like you said, it's better than being dead."

There was a long silence after that. Harry shifted awkwardly in his seat and sipped at his lukewarm tea.

"I forgot," Petri said suddenly, "I have something for you." He pulled a small glass pendant out of his pocket, not unlike the anti-evil eye amulet that he had given Harry. This one was clear, perhaps meant to be a dove.

"What does it do?" Mrs Figg asked.

"Portkey, if you need to get away. It goes to Octavian's grave. The passphrase is his full name," Petri said.

"Illegal, I suppose," Mrs Figg said.

"Who will you tell?" Petri asked, smiling faintly, before he sobered. "Not Dumbledore, I hope."

"He doesn't know that we're still in contact," Mrs Figg assured him.

Petri nodded. They exchanged some last pleasantries, Mrs Figg promising again to send Harry recipes when she had the chance, and then they apparated back home.

Or rather, they apparated to the entrance of Diagon Alley, just past the brick archway that led to the Leaky Cauldron.

"So you can't apparate anywhere else in Diagon Alley?" Harry asked.

"All of the Alleys are concentrated in a single, physical alley," Petri explained. "That's the only accessible location to apparate into. Once inside the wizard space, it's possible to apparate anywhere."

He demonstrated by surprise-apparating them back to the graveyard. Harry swallowed convulsively to avoid bringing up his recent dinner.

"Can I learn to apparate?" Harry asked. It would be dead useful.

"When you are seventeen," Petri told him as they walked up the path.

"I've apparated before," Harry protested, "accidentally. When I was seven, or eight."

"I am surprised that you're still in one piece," Petri said. "Apparition is very dangerous. One mistake, and you could die. You're unlikely to have the appropriate magical volume for several more years."

Harry narrowed his eyes. "What does that mean? I thought you said magical flow peaks at eleven, and that's why school starts at eleven!"

"Yes, the _flow_ of your magic becomes fixed once you begin to use it regularly. But the flow is only the shape—magical volume also depends on speed. Apparition requires more than twice as much magic as you can hold in your body at one time. Do you understand?" Petri glanced back intently. "All the magic in your body to disapparate, and all of it again to apparate at your destination. Do you understand what happens if you cannot replenish it quickly enough? Your apparition attempt will fail and you will die."

"That's—all right, I get it, but what if my life is in danger anyway, and I need to escape?" Harry insisted.

Petri whipped around and cast some jinx with a circular wand motion, meeting Harry's eyes intently. It wasn't anything he recognised, so Harry elected not to panic, and waited for an explanation.

"Anti-disapparition jinx. It will be the first thing that anybody who wishes to imprison you will cast," Petri said.

"Oh," said Harry. "And you can't cancel it?"

"You must knock out the caster, or if it's an enchantment, destroy the object," Petri said.

"What about a portkey, like the one you gave Mrs Figg?" Harry asked.

"I could make you a portkey that comes here, if you really wish," Petri said, "but a simple _finite_ will break the charm, and it's inadvisable to be caught with an illegal portkey. It's a fifty galleon fine and up to three months in Azkaban."

"What?" Harry demanded. "For a portkey? But what about Mrs Figg then?"

"She's a squib," Petri said, eyebrows raised. "Nobody would ever suspect."

"Squibs have witch and wizard relatives, don't they? Surely it's pretty common for them to have magical things?" said Harry.

"Squibs are the ultimate shame of their families," Petri said. "People will do anything to distance themselves. They plague the streets here, ever since the British Ministry made it illegal to kill them."

Harry's jaw dropped. "But you're friends with Mrs Figg."

"I am, yes. We're not related," said Petri, as if that explained it all.

Harry sensed that Petri had no desire to expound on this topic. He climbed down the coffin stairs after Petri and said, "All right, so no apparition or portkeys yet, but what about magic speed? Does it just get faster as you get older? Is there some other way to make it faster?"

Petri snorted. "Nothing like that—you misunderstand. The speed of magic is what it is for a given spell. The question is whether your body can withstand it. If the answer is no, then in the best case the spell simply backfires, and in the worst case you overextend yourself to the point that you fall apart. Enough on this." He sat down at the table and summoned Harry's new tarot deck to him, separating out the illustrated major arcana and banishing the fifty-six blank cards across the table. "Finish your deck," he said.

"With a quill?" Harry asked, trying not to think too hard about what it meant to 'fall apart' from overly ambitious spellcasting. Had Petri meant that literally?

"Did you have something else in mind?" Petri asked.

"Colour-change charm?" Harry suggested. Petri shrugged.

"If you find that easier," he said.

It wasn't easier, exactly, since instead of poor handwriting he had to contend with poor visualisation skill, but it was faster for copying parts of designs onto other cards. There were four suits—wands, goblets, stars, and swords—with fourteen cards each. Conveniently, runic numbers went right up to thirteen, and then there was also a knave in each suit. It took him the better part of the day to draw them all up to his satisfaction and assign meanings to each.

It was time worth spending, though, because it meant he could finally do a reading. The most basic reading, according to Petri, was the past-present-future reading, which involved placing any number of cards in three columns while keeping the same question in mind.

"Try to discover what you must do in order to postpone your death as long as possible," Petri suggested.

Harry thought that that was a good idea, but it wasn't the only thing he was interested in. He hadn't forgotten about the implication that he could achieve true resurrection. He flipped three cards.

The Tower, the six of wands, and Death reversed.

So something bad had happened before. The present was stable? And if he took it literally, he could thwart his death in the future. Harry frowned.

"Can I do another one?" he asked.

"Once a day," Petri said. "You're unlikely to get a better answer so quickly."

But the next day, and the next, also brought nothing new, though the exact cards that surfaced were different. No matter how thoroughly he shuffled the deck, his past-present-future reading came up with variations on the same message: there had been a disaster, and now he had to stay committed to his current course if he wanted to have a future at all.

Of course, it would help if he knew what exactly he was doing correctly, right now, that he was supposed to be committing to.

Sighing, Harry tucked his deck into its box and flopped onto his bed. His wand told him it was four in the morning, an awkward time when it was too late for a human to be up and too early for a vampire to be sleeping. Still, he had not fully adjusted to a nocturnal schedule and already felt his energy flagging.

He had closed his eyes for no more than a minute when he nearly whited out with pain. It was like someone had thrust a giant needle into his eye. He must have been screaming but he couldn't hear himself—there was muffled static in his ears, like they'd been filled up with cotton.

Then he couldn't feel his body, and everything was silent and black. After a moment, his sight returned, revealing flickering orange shadows—firelight. He heard crackling, felt too-hot tongues of warmth licking at his skin. The air tasted stale, like packed earth.

"Quirinus," he said, and sat up.

Quirrell, sans turban, was slumped on a roughly-hewn wooden chair by the fireplace, dozing off. At the sound of his name, his head jerked up, and then he leapt to his feet as if lashed.

"M-Master," he mumbled, eyes widening in awe. "It worked?"

"Did you doubt that it would?" Harry asked, carefully standing. Quirrell shook his head rapidly.

"No Master, of course not," he said. Harry reached out with a long, pale hand and beckoned for Quirrell to approach.

"You have served me well, after all," Harry said, "and so you will be rewarded. Come here."

Quirrell was smiling, as if hopeful, but his eyes betrayed trepidation and terror as he drew near.

Harry raised his hand and summoned something wandlessly—a small crystal phial, half full of ruby-red liquid. Quirrell's eyes widened in disbelief as it was presented to him.

"I have no need of this any longer," Harry said, thoroughly indifferent. "Do with it as you will."

"Thank you, Master," Quirrell whispered with heartfelt fervour. He stared at the phial for a long moment before tucking it into an inner pocket.

"That is nothing, only a taste of what you might receive, should you continue to help me. Your second reward, Quirinus, is a choice. You are a young man still, and I understand you have personal ambitions. You are free to go."

Quirrell's face was slack with confusion. "G-go?" he finally stammered.

Harry remained silent just long enough that Quirrell began to step back before he said, "Unless… you wish to stay? You are, of course, more than welcome."

"Yes!" Quirrell cried. His voice echoed feebly off the stone walls, and he cringed somewhat. "Yes, Master, please—I would be honoured to remain at your side."

"For eternity?" Harry asked, as if sceptical.

"Yes, Master, for eternity," Quirrell confirmed, not stuttering.

"How wonderful to hear that," said Harry, a faint smile tugging at his lips before the expression fell away abruptly. "Kneel, then, and give me your arm."

Quirrell did not ask which one. He lowered himself shakily, wincing as his knees met unyielding stone, and pulled his robe sleeve back from his left arm, baring the underside. It trembled noticeably, but his expression was resolute.

"This will hurt," Harry warned, taking the proffered wrist in hand and pressing the pale tip of his forefinger into the upper forearm. A tongue of black flame shot out and curled against the skin, and then Harry's head was on fire, his body was jerking uncontrollably, and a rhythmic thudding sound was driving daggers into his skull.

"Harry! Harry, wake up!" somebody shouted in his ear, and Harry opened his eyes deliriously to see Silviu's blurry, waxy face looming over him. He recoiled and slammed into the headboard. The pain in the back of his head distracted him somewhat from the pain in the front, and his vision focused as much as it could without the aid of his spectacles.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded. His voice was thin and hoarse, and he felt suddenly freezing and very cognisant of the liberal amount of sweat that had condensed all over his body.

"I felt your pain through our bond," Silviu said, looking equally confused. "I thought—well, what's going on? Did you have a nightmare?"

Harry tried to think of what he had just been doing. Certainly not talking with Professor Quirrell. His ears were still ringing faintly, and his scar pulsed angrily with pain, but it was already fading.

"I wasn't even sleeping," he said, just to get that embarrassing possibility out of the way. "I think I had… some kind of vision?"

But now that he had a moment to reflect on what he had experienced, he thought that it was obvious enough that the vision had been of the Dark Lord. Nobody else was likely to be in the vicinity of Professor Quirrell, and Harry knew well enough by now what the Dark Lord's emotions felt like, so dull and intense by turns.

"You had a vision of the Dark Lord?" Silviu demanded, his mouth hanging open in surprise. Harry frowned and covered his eyes, even though he knew the vampire didn't need eye contact.

"That's priv—sensitive information," he said. He tried very hard not to think of anything else bad, remembered the strange thought about passing boats that Silviu had sent him once, and focused on that. Two boats, drifting in the moonlit water.

"Is he back?" Silviu asked. "I'd heard rumours that he was immortal, but I didn't know whether to believe them…"

Silviu sounded hopeful. Harry removed his hands from his face and blinked up at the vampire. His expression matched his tone. So he supported the Dark Lord. Why was Harry surprised?

"He's back," Harry said, not really seeing any point in prevaricating at this juncture. Maybe he could keep Silviu distracted enough not to wonder at why Harry was having mysterious visions in the first place.

"We have to prepare," said Silviu, and wasn't that exactly what Petri had said? Harry frowned.

"Prepare how?" he asked, ready for some cryptic half-answer.

To his surprise, Silviu said, "We'll have to call a company meeting. No doubt the Dark Lord will ask us to help finance his activities again, and we should have a plan laid out beforehand to deal with the goblins."

It was Harry's turn to gape. For some reason, when he thought of Silviu joining the Dark Lord, he had imagined an army of snarling vampires cresting a hill with the full moon at their back.

Silviu laughed at his expression. "Vampires would make terrible soldiers against wizards," he said. "We can only do magic at night, and none of our skills are suitable for self-defence."

"But you can do spells if you have a wand," Harry protested, remembering all the times Petri had lectured him about how outclassed a wizard was by an armed vampire.

"I can do spells because I used to be a wizard," Silviu said. "British wizards don't let themselves get infected, as a rule, so I can't say the same for the rest of the company."

"Oh," said Harry.

"Don't worry. We make up for it by being very good with money," Silviu assured him with a wry smile. "It's money that wins wars, not brute force."

"I guess I never realised. I thought that, er, goblins have all the gold," Harry said. He remembered vaguely from History of Magic that after the last goblin rebellions, it had been agreed that Gringotts would be the sole issuer of magical currency.

"All the gold, yes," Silviu drawled with derision, "savages that they are. They have no understanding of real value. Value lies in agreements between people, not in lumps of metal."

Harry wasn't sure what to say to that.

"Anyway," Silviu continued, "You're pretty sure that your vision was genuine? Yes, I suppose you are. I'll go call the board together."

"Er, I think I should talk to my master first," Harry said.

"Of course," said Silviu. "How about let's meet at eight? At the Coffin House."

"All right," Harry agreed.

"You'll be fine on your own?" Silviu asked.

"I've been fine," Harry said a little tetchily. Silviu nodded and left by way of his vampire apparition, melting away into shadow.

Harry sighed and rubbed at his scar, and then at the lump that had formed on the back of his head. The pain barely registered. He considered the merit of going outside and walking all the way to Crystal Wonders, before groaning and sinking his face into his pillow. Petri would be back in a matter of hours, long before eight. There was no reason to make the extra trip.

He woke to the creaking of the coffin lid and the click of shoes against the wooden stairs. Remembering suddenly that he had an appointment to keep, he sat up straight, heart leaping into his throat, and fumbled for his wand to check the time.

Seven. Harry exhaled sharply and leaned back. Petri, who had evidently just arrived and was stripping off his cloak, glanced to him questioningly.

"Hi," said Harry. "I, er, had a vision about the Dark Lord and Professor Quirrell."

"A vision," Petri repeated. "As in, a dream?"

"No! I wasn't sleeping. It was earlier. My scar really hurt, and then I sort of saw through the Dark Lord's eyes. He had his own body and he was talking to Professor Quirrell," Harry tried to explain.

Petri obviously did not know what to make of this, because he opened and closed his mouth several times.

"And, er, Silviu was here. I mean he came, because of our bond, he said? He said he felt my pain and I suppose he got worried," Harry added. "But he found out that the Dark Lord is back, and now he's having a meeting with the company at eight."

"Vlaicu knew you were in pain?" Petri asked. "That's impossible, unless—has he bitten you again?"

"No," said Harry, but then hesitated. "Not that I remember. I mean, obviously, he could have erased my memory again."

"Lie down," Petri said. "I'm going to cast the cruciatus curse and you can try to remember."

Harry's mouth suddenly went dry at this unwelcome news. Petri did not give him more time to be nervous—red light filled Harry's vision and then every nerve was on fire, and why did he ever think the pain in his scar was bad, that was nothing. Paradoxically, he could still feel the softness of the bed beneath him, and yet it did nothing to soothe the agony.

It lasted forever, but was really over almost as soon as it began. Harry was reeling, astonished to find himself perfectly well and in one piece on the bed. He tried to be angry, because Petri was a madman, except he also knew intellectually that Petri had acted with good reason, because it was the only way to break a memory charm.

He considered whether he had learned anything new, searching for some impression of Silviu's fangs in his throat, but there was only the single incident in the graveyard, already so long ago that he had trouble bringing up the details.

"There's nothing," he said, hoping Petri would not take that as a sign that he needed to try the cruciatus again.

There were three firm knocks at the door. Petri slid it open with a wave of his wand to reveal Silviu's scuffed black boots.

"Vlaicu, to what do we owe the pleasure of your visit?" Petri asked, peering up from the base of the staircase.

"Is Harry all right?" Silviu asked. "I sensed… distress, so I came to check on him."

Harry sighed and slipped out of bed, trying to smooth his rumpled robes. "I'm fine," he said. It was true; he was fine _now_.

Silviu crouched down to get a better look without actually coming inside, and gave Harry a searching look.

"All right," he said at last. "Sorry for disturbing you. I've been on edge tonight… see you in a bit, Harry."

Petri inclined his head and the vampire heaved the coffin door closed. They waited in silence for a few beats before Petri said, "Well, I suppose that proves that I'm an utter fool."

Harry blinked at him.

"All this time, I thought I had tricked him into thinking he had given you his blood, but it turns out I was tricking myself into thinking he hadn't."

"So is it bad?" Harry muttered, not really eager to find out the new estimate of just how close he was to becoming a vampire.

"It is what it is," said Petri, scowling. "You are connected to him. His magic will affect you more strongly, but thankfully you're no muggle and should still be able to resist his compulsions to some extent."

"He did promise not to do that any more, and he hasn't," Harry pointed out.

Petri's gave a reluctant nod. "Regardless, you're also defenceless against his legilimency, which is likely the greater problem. You said he learned that the Dark Lord will be returning?"

"Has returned," Harry corrected. "I'm pretty sure he has a body now."

"Has returned," Petri said with a strained voice. "And what did he think of that?"

"Er, he said he was going to get the company together to figure out how to, er, support the Dark Lord financially," Harry said.

Petri took off his glasses and rubbed tiredly at his face. "You realise that you are part of his company, and that will implicitly put you in the Dark Lord's service as well?"

Harry winced. "Maybe it's better that way? If I go against him, then we'll be enemies for sure, and he'll kill me. If I help him, then it doesn't make as much sense that he would kill me."

"He will kill you," Petri reminded him, "It is your fate. The question is whether you will die fighting or not."

Harry frowned. "No it's not. Almost everything I saw shows me fighting, doesn't it? So that's part of it no matter what."

"Hmm. I suppose that's true. Perhaps you should consult the cards, then," said Petri.

Harry glanced over to his tarot deck and was struck by sudden understanding. "That's what it meant! Commit to what I started. I already helped the Dark Lord get the philosopher's stone. If I want to live, I have to keep helping him. But… he's kind of evil, isn't he?"

Petri snorted. "Everyone is good in their own eyes. You have to decide where your definition of good falls."

"I don't know!" Harry cried, and was shocked to discover that he really did not. He had rules in his head for right and wrong, but he couldn't feel their compulsion in the same way as with other truths like 'the sky is blue'. "What do you think? I thought you said you don't support the Dark Lord?"

"I don't, but that's irrelevant," Petri said. "I think you should not make the same mistake that I did. Do not be defined by your loyalties. Act for your own sake. When you act for others' sake, you will inevitably suffer."

"Well my own sake includes not dying, right?" Harry muttered. It did not feel like a choice. It seemed obviously bad to aid the murderer of his parents, and yet it felt equally bad to throw away his life in order to avoid doing that.

It occurred to him then to wonder why Silviu supported the Dark Lord. What advantage would he reap if the Dark Lord were to succeed at… whatever it was the Dark Lord was trying to do? Take over the Ministry?

Silviu, it turned out, was delighted to answer these questions.

"I came to England because of the Dark Lord," he told Harry, ushering him into the back room of the Coffin House where a table had been set with tea. Nobody else was there yet, as Harry had arrived fifteen minutes early. "He really had a revolutionary attitude, at a time when all Europe was getting more and more conservative and cracking down on non-wizards. There's this thought that's deeply rooted in old wizarding families, that we're inferior and should only exist to serve wizards."

Harry tried to imagine how vampires could be useful to wizards and could not come up with anything.

Silviu snorted. "Vampires had a use too, as an easily controlled way of destroying a wizard's standing. We were nothing more than generations of illegitimate children and unwanted heirs. Really, I suppose we could have gone on like that indefinitely, but then they came for our wands."

Harry nodded, remembering that vampires were included in the international wand ban for non-humans.

"The Dark Lord promised to overturn the old order. No wand ban, no non-human registration, no forced integration or separation," Silviu said.

Harry thought about how wizards like Petri and Lucius Malfoy looked down their noses at non-humans, and could see where Silviu was coming from. But Malfoy had been a follower of the Dark Lord.

"Aren't some of his followers the same kind of wizards who think you're inferior?" Harry asked.

Silviu nodded. "It doesn't matter what they think about us. He's already promised them mud—muggle-borns. They can't ask for more than that when they need our help."

Harry blinked rapidly. "He promised them muggle-borns? What does that mean?" he demanded.

"It means they'll be expelled from society, returned to the muggle world, I expect," Silviu said.

"Really? It sounds like they'll be killed," Harry said, narrowing his eyes. He knew that dark wizards did not shy away from murdering their enemies, and he hoped Silviu wasn't trying to delude anybody. He felt a little cold. Could he really support the Dark Lord and save his own life, knowing that he would consign others to a horrible end? People he knew, like Hermione? People like his own mum?

Silviu winced. "Perhaps. The Dark Lord himself has no stake in the matter as long as his followers do not fight amongst themselves. From my limited interaction with him, I don't think he really cares about anything besides his own power. But he keeps his promises. That I am sure of."

"You've met him?" Harry asked, glancing away to avoid focusing on Silviu as he thought back to his own experience with the Dark Lord. It did seem consistent with what Silviu was saying—he wanted power over other people, and he was sincere about rewarding those who helped him.

"A few times," said Silviu. "He came personally to ask us for help, and he was very courteous—knew all about our customs."

"Customs?" Harry asked. "Er, are there things I should know?"

Silviu laughed and shook his head. "That was before I was chair. The company was a lot smaller and more traditional. I got rid of all that stuffy formality as soon as I could. There's no place for it in a modern company."

Harry got the impression in his mind's eye of a strict hierarchy, bows and handshakes, special titles, and rules about sharing blood. Apparently vampires would drink each other's blood, as a display of power. Silviu seemed to find this practice distasteful.

The shop's bell tolled mournfully, and a moment later Shy stepped through, clutching a sheaf of parchments and a wooden frame with columns of beads that Harry thought might be an abacus. She tossed the parchments onto the table and sat down on Silviu's right side.

"Hey. What's this about?" she asked. Silviu looked up at her and her eyes widened fractionally. "Oh." She glanced to Harry, but didn't say anything.

Annette, Leticia, and a blond vampire whom Harry had not seen before arrived in quick succession. Before Harry could attempt an awkward introduction, Silviu said, "Ness, I don't believe you and Harry have met. Harry is our newest member, and knows a few things about the topic of our meeting today. Harry, this is Ness, our secretary."

Harry stood up and clasped hands with Ness, reaching up from below as he remembered doing with Shy. "Nice to meet you," he said, a little distracted. He couldn't for the life of him tell if Ness was a man or a woman. They had a boyish face, long hair tied back in a ponytail, and wore billowing grey robes.

"Pleasure," said Ness, their voice somehow providing no further hints. Ness took a seat beside Shy. Annette sat on Silviu's left and Leticia settled across from him, right next to Harry. She grinned at him, and he smiled back hesitantly.

There was one last vacant seat on Leticia's other side. A minute later, a dishevelled Mr Moribund ran inside and sat down, his briefcase slamming into the ground with a thud. He ducked his head apologetically without breaking eye contact with Silviu.

"All right, I know this meeting was sudden, so let me just bring you all up to speed on what happened," Silviu said, clasping his hands together. He swept his gaze around the table, locking eyes with each person in turn except Harry.

"Questions?" he said, when he finished.

Ness looked to Harry, and then back at Silviu. "I don't mean to question your judgement, Chairman, but you're really sure that it was a true vision? I've never heard of wizards having them."

"I am sure that Harry was sure," Silviu said. "I don't doubt your word, Harry, but could you perhaps explain the situation a little more?"

Harry floundered for a few moments, not having expected the question. He couldn't exactly tell them how he was connected to the Dark Lord because he was Harry Potter. What else was there to the situation? He thought about what had happened and seized on a likely story. "I was trying to do divination," he said, which was true. "Then my head hurt and I was suddenly seeing the Dark Lord talking to my—one of his followers. I know that the Dark Lord is alive because he was at Hogwarts this year. He stole… something important."

"Oh, so regardless, we _are_ sure that the Dark Lord isn't dead. That's good," Ness said.

Silviu nodded. "I do not know if he will ask us for aid again like he did before, but as it is we did provide him with a sizeable loan. Or perhaps I should say investment—I wouldn't dare to approach him as a creditor, but I would like to have another chance at getting the return we were promised. Freedom is priceless, after all."

"Do you remember how much it was last time?" Shy asked. "I'm not going looking for a decade-old write-off."

"Wait," said Annette, "Do we really think the Dark Lord can succeed after what happened last time? And even if he does, what exactly are we standing to gain? For all we know, his pureblood followers will just walk all over us."

"Last time, he somehow failed to kill a baby, and then just disappeared," Leticia pointed out. Then she giggled loudly, before coughing and continuing, "He sure didn't just run away."

Mr Moribund held up a hand. Silviu nodded and said, "We will make the contract more explicit this time."

"There's nothing holding him to any contract," Annette protested. "Even if it's magical—there are ways around them all."

"I don't believe that he would renege on any agreement," Silviu said. "I have never heard anybody so much as accuse him of dishonest dealing."

"Even when the agreement is basically to protect us from his other followers? You know that we will have to live in the same world as people like my father, out in the open, if he wins?" Annette said. She turned to the table at large and said, "A necromancer who treats people as his playthings? He could turn all of us into living dolls if he wanted. Do you really believe the Dark Lord will think it worth the effort to rein him in? What about the likes of Macnair? He would hunt us for sport."

"Those are all valid concerns," said Silviu, "but they would be equally valid or worse if we decided to withhold aid. I do not for a moment think that the Dark Lord would be dependent on our help. He has the wealth of a dozen pureblood houses at hand. We can provide him with better resources and procurement, but I hesitate to call that decisive."

"Again, he had the same things last time," said Annette, "and he didn't succeed after all. You can laugh all you like at the Boy-Who-Lived, there's no way that was just a fluke. Something happened to him, and somebody was behind that. It must have been some kind of trap."

"Let's get the pros and cons on paper—parchment, whatever," said Shy, slapping a blank piece of parchment down on the table and extracting a fountain pen out of her pocket. "Ness, let me copy your notes."

Ness rotated their parchment slightly, and Shy began to scribble furiously. "So the way I understand it, and correct me if I'm wrong, because I was just some muggle brat last time this happened, but the Dark Lord promised us that we wouldn't have to live in the slums like second-class citizens if he won, but he didn't win because of the whole Boy-Who-Lived incident. If we help him again and he wins, he'll probably keep his promise, but he has other followers who still think we're scum, who we're going to have to live with. If we don't help him and he wins, we're screwed, courtesy of those followers. If we do help him and he _doesn't_ win, then what happens? We lose money? How much?"

"Something like two years of dark arts paraphernalia revenue," Silviu said. Shy winced.

"All right, that's pretty bad. Worse than I thought," she said. She flicked her fingers across the abacus and wrote down a few figures. "That's like, four thousand galleons."

"And how much is the enterprise worth?" Ness asked. "Fifty?"

"Forty-seven thousand," said Shy.

"We'll survive it," said Ness. "We won't survive refusing the Dark Lord if he wins. We may not even have a choice, if he comes to us. He might decide we're better off dead, or as entertainment for wizards."

They were looking straight at Annette, and obviously expecting a response. She sighed.

"You're right, but I still think we should be careful and leave ourselves as much of a way out as possible, no matter what happens. At the very least I think we should wait for him to come to us," she said.

"I'm aligned," said Silviu. "Any objections to waiting?"

Silviu made a round of eye contact again, before he nodded. "We'll wait. But we need to deal with the goblins as soon as possible. If they suspect we're fenerating they will move to block us from our accounts."

"What, are you serious?" Shy demanded. "That's so backwards. I don't know why I expected anything else. So what do we do? Liquidate mugglewise?"

Silviu nodded. "Your group can handle it, right?" Shy nodded. "Leticia, I'll need you to spread the word that we're in the market for shrivelfigs and sopophorus beans."

There was more rapid-fire planning, half of it telepathic, and Harry slumped a little in his seat, feeling very out of his depth again. Leticia pushed up the brim of her hat and shot him a crooked smile.

"Don't look so glum," she said. "Leave the plotting up to Silvy and just sit back and relax. It's his job to figure out what to do."

Harry nodded. He supposed nobody was expecting him to actually do anything. But then, why invite him to the meeting at all?

Apparently, he had been wondering too publicly, because Silviu finished his discussion with Shy and Ness and turned to him. "Harry, I don't want you to feel like you're responsible for any of this. You can just worry about doing well in school and leave company business to us. But if you do have another… vision, and you see something that could affect us, could you let me know?"

"Er, of course," Harry agreed, a little disappointed that that was all. Then again, didn't he have more than enough to worry about already?

The meeting adjourned soon after, but Shy detained him as he made for the door.

"Hey, Harry, Ness and I are off to the pub. You want to join?" she asked.

Harry wondered what had possessed her to invite him—he knew he must seem like a little kid to her—and judging by the placement of their eyebrows, Ness was wondering the same thing.

Shy slapped them on the shoulder. "Harry's brilliant, you'll love him," she said, and then winked at Harry.

"Cauldron or Wyvern?" asked Ness.

"Ha, you're funny," said Shy.

"I'm serious," Ness insisted, glancing to Harry.

"Don't let Ness baby you," Shy told him.

"Wyvern's fine," Harry said. Shy grinned. She grabbed Ness's hand and dragged them to the threshold of the shop, where she paused and winced.

"Sun's out," she said, indicating the morning rays peaking threateningly through the blinds.

"Let's just apparate home," said Ness. "I don't want to be stranded at the Wyvern."

Shy frowned, but then slumped in acquiescence. She shot Harry an apologetic look. "Sounds like a change of plans. You can still join us, though. C-10, remember?"

"Oh. If you're sure," Harry said.

Shy nodded enthusiastically. "Definitely. Meet us there. I'd take you, but I don't trust myself to walk anyone else yet…"

She let go of Ness and scrunched up her face, taking a step and then melting away. Ness nodded to Harry and disappeared after her in the same way.

Harry hurried down the alley, which was deserted as it always was at this time of day. He debated stopping at his coffin to let Petri know where he would be, but then decided that there was no point in doing that and made directly for the headstone marked C-10. Underneath were two names: Shivani Shyverwretch and Nim Van Ness. Harry hadn't realised that they actually lived together. Did that mean that Ness was a girl?

Harry knocked on the door of their wicker casket.

"It's unlocked!" he heard, so he opened it and descended the stairs. The space was smaller than his and Petri's, the default coffin house size, but it was packed with colourful furnishings and fixtures that ran all the way up the walls. In the back corner was a narrow bunk bed, the bottom bunk of which had been pulled out into a makeshift couch.

Shy and Ness were sitting there behind a wooden tea table which had been laid out with an assortment of glasses and some large, opaque bottles. Shy waved at him to take the low purple settee across from them.

"Welcome to our humble abode," she said, gesturing grandly with her arms. "Beats sleeping in a literal coffin. What would you like to drink? I recommend the firewhiskey."

"I don't recommend the firewhiskey," Ness deadpanned. They pushed the larger jug forward. "Try the butterbeer. I'm pretty sure you'll like it more."

Harry poured himself some butterbeer. It was golden and frothy and smelled strongly of butterscotch. He took a sip, and it was like drinking liquid sugar with a faintly bitter finish.

"It's good," he said. Ness nodded with a tight smile.

"We were just talking about the Dark Lord," Shy said. "I really don't know much about him so Ness was trying to bring me up to speed. Hey, weren't you like, barely born when the Dark Lord was last a thing? How come you're having visions about him or whatever?"

"Er…" Harry said.

"I was curious about that as well," said Ness, tilting their head like a bird. "I didn't know that humans could have visions. What was it like?"

Harry considered refusing to answer, but could not come up with a satisfactory reason why he should conceal every bit of information, and so he said, vaguely, "I sort of saw through his eyes."

This seemed to be the right thing to say, because Ness's eyes lit up. They nodded. "Oh, yes! That happens to me with the chairman sometimes. Sorry. I didn't mean to imply that you were making things up or hallucinating or anything."

"It's all right," said Harry.

"I can't get over how he vanished after trying to kill a baby," Shy said. "Just, what?"

Ness shrugged elegantly. "Nobody knows what really happened. Some people think his killing curse was reflected right back at him, but there was no body. Maybe it was some sort of cover-up. Everybody thought he was unstoppable. I mean, I certainly thought so. He had this… aura. You know when the chairman slips up and uses his gaze? That's how it felt when he was in the room, only he didn't even have to look at you."

"Scary," said Shy.

"Gaze?" Harry asked.

"I suppose the chairman hasn't done it to you before?" Shy asked. "Makes you feel really weak, like you're about to float right out of your body."

"Oh," said Harry, thinking to his memory of Nalrod's death and the afterimage of Silviu's burning eyes. That effect must be what Shy and Ness were talking about. Come to think of it, when he had seen Nalrod's death, that had been a vision too—Nic had said something to that effect. Hadn't he mentioned that it was due to sympathetic magic? But then how could Harry and the Dark Lord have any such connection, when they were both human?

"I really thought that the Dark Lord would take over, back then," Ness murmured, clenching their fists. "You didn't see what it was like, after he was gone. Crouch—he was the head of the DMLE—pushed for all kinds of horrible sanctions on non-wizards. Nobody could prove we were involved, but it didn't matter. Vampires were banned from holding public office, from buying property if a wizard wanted it instead. The aurors turned a blind eye when people ransacked our shops. Sometimes they would just turn around and arrest us for no reason."

"It's not that bad now, though," said Shy.

"Because we shut up and hid," Ness muttered, taking a measured sip of their drink. "All those laws are still there. You can read their naffing 'Guidelines for Treatment of Non-Wizard Part-Humans' Promise it'll make you hurl. I just saw an article in the _Prophet_ last week calling for the Ministry to legalise vampire-hunting."

Shy winced. Ness was not finished.

"You know, there's no reason we can't coexist with wizards, or have wizard friends. They can literally just take blood-replenishing potion. Just look at Sanguini. It's risky though. If Eldred reports him, he could be kissed."

"He'd never do that," Shy protested.

"I know, but still. They met in Italy. It's not as bad there. I wouldn't risk it here." Ness glanced to Harry uncertainly. "So what's the story with you and the chairman?"

"Er, I'm not sure," Harry said. Ness blinked in confusion. Shy quickly interceded with an actual explanation.

"The chairman told me it was an accident," she said.

"He's too old to be having accidents," said Ness sceptically, before turning to Harry again, "and you're not sure? Didn't you agree to be his friend?"

"Well, no," Harry said. Ness looked horrified, so he hastened to add, "but it's all right. We've cleared it all up. I think."

Ness took a long drink. "You're a wizard right?"

Harry nodded. Ness peered at him around their glass with one piercing grey eye.

"Just so you know, a vampire can be sentenced to the kiss—you know what that is?" Ness began, and Harry nodded again. "For biting a wizard against their will. It's battery, and I'm not saying it's not awful, but it doesn't deserve the kiss. Please remember that."

"I won't tell anybody about the chairman," Harry said. "Don't worry."

Ness nodded to him and set down their glass. "That's a relief to hear. We all depend on the chairman to keep us safe. There's nobody else in the company with enough experience to take over his position. I suppose you're one of us now, so for what it's worth, welcome." They raised their glass again, and Harry and Shy met them in a toast.

"To the company," said Shy. Harry echoed her and drank.

"So the chairman doesn't normally form a bond with anybody so young," Ness said. "I'm guessing that that was somehow also an accident?"

"Er, yeah," Harry confirmed. Ness sighed.

"Why didn't he inform me of this at all?" they asked nobody in particular. Shy shrugged.

"You know how he is. Thinks he can handle everything on his own," she said.

"We're not children any more," Ness said. "He needs to stop treating us like we are."

Harry found it somewhat heartening that he wasn't the only whom Silviu deemed "too young" to know things. Then again, it did not bode well for him that Ness, who was by all appearances an adult, was still experiencing this problem.

"Yeah, you're ancient," said Shy, poking them. Ness shoved her back, proving that they were, perhaps, still a little childish.

"How old are you?" Harry asked Ness. "Er, if you're all right with saying."

Ness caught Harry's eye and quickly composed themselves, going as far as scooting to the right and out of Shy's reach. "I'm thirty-seven," they said. "And you?"

"Almost twelve," Harry said. Ness raised an eyebrow.

"Almost?" they repeated. Harry flushed.

"At the end of July," he said.

"Sorry if this isn't a great question, but have you got parents?" Ness asked.

"They're dead," said Harry, "but I live with my uncle."

"He runs the new toy shop," Shy said. "Apparently he's some kind of big bad wizard like Ettie's old man."

"Like Yaxley? You mean, he's a necromancer?" Ness demanded. Harry sighed inwardly. This was the worst-kept secret ever.

"Yeah, that was it," said Shy. "So what's so bad about necromancers?"

"Er, besides that they can make you their mindless slave in ten seconds flat?" Ness muttered. "No big deal."

"What?" Shy looked incredulous.

"We're dead. Necromancers control the dead. Stellar combination," Ness said.

"You didn't mention that," Shy said to Harry weakly.

"I didn't think about it like that," Harry mumbled. He didn't think it was as easy as Ness was making it out to be, either. Petri had been reluctant to do anything major to Silviu, though now that Harry thought about it, he had given no explanation for why. Perhaps it required expensive ingredients.

"Well, I suppose he's been around for a while and we're all still fine, right?" Ness murmured to themselves. "Does he come into the alley often?"

"Don't you live practically next door?" Shy asked. Harry nodded mutely.

"What? In the plots?" Ness demanded. "How?"

"Er, my uncle pretended that he was half-vampire," Harry told them. "I really don't think he would hurt you." That wasn't strictly true, but he also could see no immediate reason why Petri would suddenly go about ruining the lives of their neighbours after living in peace for so long.

Just when he finished speaking, there was a knock on the door, and everybody's head whipped up, as if they might be able to see through the wicker. Actually, Harry remembered that he could. He adjusted his spectacles and got an unpleasant close-up view of Petri's lined face.

"Er, I think that's him, actually. I'll just go get the door," Harry mumbled, getting to his feet. He paused, but Shy and Ness were frozen in their seats, so he sprinted up the stairs and pushed open the door. "Hello, Uncle Jochen," he greeted.

"Harry. Vlaicu told me I could find you here. Care to introduce me to your hosts?" Petri said, crouching down so that he could see inside.

"Er…" said Harry, glancing back and forth between the vampires and Petri. Finally, Ness got to their feet and pulled Shy along, standing in front of her protectively all the while.

"So this is my uncle, Jochen," Harry said. "Uncle, this is Shyverwretch, from the poison shop, and Ness. They're part of Silviu's company."

"Thank you for watching my wayward… nephew," said Petri, amusement sparkling in his eyes. Harry wasn't sure what was so funny. Ness looked terrified—their mouth was set in a grim line. "I'll be taking him off your hands now. He has some studying to get to."

Petri stood up and turned to leave. Harry ascended the remaining stairs and waved goodbye to Shy and Ness, trying to give them a reassuring smile. Shy smiled back weakly.

Harry and Petri walked the twenty feet to D-12 and descended into their own coffin house in silence, Harry wondering all the while if he was in trouble for going off on his own.

But Petri only said, "I much prefer those two to Vlaicu. They clearly know their place."

Harry felt a little indignant on behalf of Shy and Ness, but at the same time had no way to contradict Petri's words. He settled for, "They're nice."

Petri snorted. "You think that about everybody," he said. "Anyway, I have some free time this morning, so I thought we could start the imperius curse."

"What?" said Harry. "Didn't we do that already?" He remembered spending extensive time last summer learning to resist it.

"I meant that you could start casting it. The imperius curse is a spell that suppresses the target's will. It's well-known as an unforgivable, but that only applies if it's cast on a human. Otherwise, it's… permissible, and is very useful for the next step of animation," Petri explained.

He summoned a piece of parchment to him, folded it into an aeroplane using a spell rather than his hands, and then enchanted it to drift lazily about Harry's head.

"The incantation is _imperio_ , and there is no wand movement—you should keep your wand very still," Petri instructed. "Establishing the initial connection to the target is very natural. You must simply intend to take control, as if reaching out to grasp it. Go on and try it."

"On the aeroplane?" Harry asked.

"Yes," said Petri impatiently.

Harry had some trouble keeping his wand still when trying to target something that was moving, but he eventually managed by waiting for the aeroplane to come into his line of fire.

" _Imperio!_ " he incanted, thinking, as Petri instructed, of grabbing the plane. Some strange warmth seemed to rush downward from his head and into his wand, connecting him momentarily with the plane as if he had really just touched it. The spell caught, and the plane stopped, falling to the ground. Harry blinked at this apparent success. He tried to pull it towards him, but this had no effect. "I can't move it," he said.

"You cannot use the imperius curse to make the target do something physically impossible," Petri told him. "The only magic in the aeroplane is my enchantment, so it can only act in accordance with that enchantment. That is the entirety of its 'will,' so to speak. You may end the curse."

Harry imagined releasing the plane, and he felt the mental connection wink out, leaving him oddly cold. The plane lifted off and began looping around him once more.

"That seemed… too easy," Harry said. "Is it harder on a person?"

"Not particularly, no," said Petri. "But there are some irritating limitations. For one, it is exactly as strong as your will to dominate, so your target either resists it or not. Worse, it's impossible to tell whether it's working. You can try casting it on me to see what I mean," said Petri.

"Er, really?" Harry asked.

"Yes, really," Petri confirmed, looking a little exasperated. Harry did not test him further, and raised his wand.

" _Imperio!_ "

Petri's face twitched ever-so-slightly.

Harry felt the same flowing warmth, the same connection from his mind to his wand, as before. He tried to will Petri to spin in a circle. Nothing happened. Then, almost mockingly, Petri turned on his heel as if he were about to apparate.

"As you can see, the spell feels the same whether or not the target obeys. They can even pretend to follow your orders exactly, only to betray you at the worst instant," he said.

Harry ended the spell before he overstepped his bounds, and nodded. Out of morbid curiosity, and remembering what Ness had claimed, he asked, "So, say you want to, er, actually enslave someone more effectively. Is there a way to do that?"

Petri raised an eyebrow, but did not comment on the nature of the question and simply answered, "That is the main intent of the imperius curse already, so mastering the curse is probably the most direct option, but yes, I could think of some ways to improve it. For example, you could try to add a compulsion curse that penalises disobedience. I am not entirely sure if that would interact with the imperius the way you would want, but it seems possible. Would you like to try it?"

Harry opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He wasn't sure which would be worse, trying it on some innocent victim or 'trying it' as the victim himself.

"I take that as a no," said Petri, thankfully. "Why do you ask, then?"

Harry considered making some half-hearted excuse, but was overcome by his need to know. "Ness mentioned that necromancers could enslave vampires completely, and I was wondering how." Petri narrowed his eyes, and Harry hurriedly added, "We were talking about Yaxley. Annette's father."

"Ah, I see," said Petri. "Have you forgotten about the changing of fate? I suppose it's been some time since you attempted it. It's a way of modifying memories from a distance, by inserting or removing information. The dead can enter dreams, as you know, and we can borrow this ability to see into the past, as with reconstruction, but also to remove or insert what we wish. Vampires are uniquely vulnerable to the technique since it can be applied directly to them rather than through a departed friend or relative."

"So it's just changing memories?" Harry asked. He did vaguely recall trying to do something of the same name to a dead spider and failing miserably. Changing memories did not sound that bad. Petri nodded.

"Do not discount its usefulness. Memories and experiences form a large part of identity, and with access to all of them, it would be easy enough to make a slave out of somebody, as your new friend fears," Petri said. He wrinkled his nose. "I say easy, in principle, but of course it would be a lot of work to carry out, for little discernible reward. I would rather have a inferius."

Harry was a little relieved to hear that Petri did not seem interested in turning anybody into a puppet, and that his assurances to Ness and Shy were valid.

"Speaking of inferi," Petri continued, "You can practise the imperius curse on Ulrich's body tonight."

"Oh. All right," said Harry, a little nervous. He hadn't forgotten how Ulrich had died, and he wasn't sure he wanted a real-life test of his imperius curse just hours after casting it for the first time.

"I'm confident that you will manage it," Petri said. "You have made significant progress, and there are many more techniques open to you now that you can adequately do basic animation."

Harry nodded, pushing his reservations aside. This, too, was part of the course he needed to commit to, if he wanted to achieve the future he had seen in the mirror and read in the cards.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Canon Harry managed to cast the imperius curse relatively successfully on his first try, so I guess it can't be that hard...


	37. Volunteer

“ _Crucio!_ ” Harry whispered, and somebody was screaming and writhing on the ground, an indistinct mass of black robes. Pathetic. He raised his hand after a short moment. It would not do to get carried away.

“Get up, Avery. Stand up,” he said, when the tortured wizard remained lying there, shuddering and heaving. They had all gone soft. Still, his disappointment was enough to command fear in them; Avery leapt to his feet as if struck and retreated back to his place in the circle of wizards. “You want forgiveness? I do not forgive. I do not forget. Ten years… ten long years… I want ten years’ repayment before I forgive you. Do not fret, my friends, there will be ample opportunity to pay your debts.”

He stepped forward, and there was restrained shudder in the circle as the masked wizards tensed as one. Harry stopped in front of a short, portly figure.

“Wormtail,” he said, “I confess myself astonished to see you here tonight. It appears that reports of your death have been greatly exaggerated. Where have you been hiding all these years, I wonder?”

“M-my Lord, Master, when Si—Black attacked me in the street I was forced to transform into my animagus form. They sent him to Azkaban and I had to stay hidden after that, or they would know he was in-innocent, and he would have really killed me,” Wormtail stammered.

“You spent ten years as a rat?” Harry asked with vague interest. Wormtail nodded frantically, and then produced something out of his robes, holding it up with shaking hands. It was a wand, long and bone-white. Fury seized his chest for an icy moment as his eyes narrowed.

“Master, I saved this f-from the wreckage, I knew you would return, I never doubted,” Wormtail blabbered. Harry took the wand, sucking in a sharp breath at the thrum of power that sang in his gut and rushed throughout his body at the reunion. His grip tightened around the handle.

“Liar,” he whispered, and turned his newly-reacquired wand on the trembling man. “ _Crucio!_ ”

Wormtail shrieked and sobbed. “You deserve this pain, Wormtail. Do not lie to your master, whom you abandoned out of cowardice. You have returned out of cowardice, as well, not loyalty.” He ended the curse and left the man to snivel on the ground. “And yet… you did return. That is commendable. There are others…” His gaze swept around the circle until it landed on a large gap in the ranks. “Others, too cowardly, even, to return. Worse yet, there is one who I believe has left us forever. He will be killed, of course.”

“Harry, Harry,” somebody was saying, and Harry tried to turn, but he noticed that he could not move his limbs. More frantically, he attempted to flail. His senses faded, he felt far away, before finally he noticed his arm was held in a vice grip, and his head was throbbing. His eyes snapped open—Petri’s indistinct form was pointing a wand at him, holding him in a rather peculiar position with one arm and leg in the air.

Before he could panic, Harry felt the invisible restraints release him. His limbs flopped onto the bed.

“You were thrashing and muttering in your sleep,” Petri told him.

“I think I had another vision of the Dark Lord,” Harry said. It had felt too crisp, too visceral to be a dream, and anyway, he remembered the name ‘Wormtail’ vividly, though he certainly knew nobody who went by such a strange moniker. He reached out for his wand and glasses and checked the time. It was nine in the evening, about time for him to get up in any case.

“Another vision… what exactly do you mean by that?” Petri asked. “Perhaps you should show me the memory.”

Harry nodded, dressing himself and following Petri down into the trunk, where he let his memory be pulled into the pensieve. Petri did not place his face inside, but instead watched the vision play out on its surface. Harry peered at the translucent, three-dimensional figures floating above the basin and did a double-take at seeing himself standing in the midst of a ring of hooded and masked wizards.

“You saw through the eyes of the Dark Lord?” Petri asked once the memory had played through once.

“Yeah,” Harry said, remembering that Ness had asked him the same thing.

“It appears to be genuine,” Petri said, “but I have never heard of a sympathetic vision between two wizards. I would have said it was impossible, but I suppose I would have been wrong.”

Harry thought he seemed to have a bit of track record for doing things that nobody had ever heard of before. Something alarming occurred to him then. “Do you think the Dark Lord might get visions of me, too?”

Petri frowned. “It’s hard to say, unless we could know more about how this… connection between you works. However, I doubt he would simply leave you be if he knew about your visions. It would pose a great risk to him that you might see his activities or whereabouts at any time.”

“Oh,” Harry said, feeling uneasy. “Do you think he would try to kill me, if he found out? Or maybe I should let him know, somehow, so he doesn’t think I’ve been spying on him?”

This suddenly seemed like a very fraught choice. His mind wandered to his tarot cards. What would they have to say?

“I do not think it would be wise to draw his attention to you unnecessarily,” Petri said. “Doubtless he has more important things to worry about, and you should hope that that continues to be the case.”

Harry nodded, seeing Petri’s point, but still unsatisfied. He did not truly think that it was possible to wait and hide, not when the Dark Lord seemed so preoccupied with loyalty and intent. He had tortured Wormtail for acting on cowardice. Harry certainly wanted first and foremost to save his own skin, but which would make him the bigger coward—keeping his ability to himself in the hope that it would go unnoticed, or going proactively to the Dark Lord? He somehow suspected it would be the former.

But there was no way for him to contact the Dark Lord anyway, he reminded himself. It wasn’t like one could just send him a letter by owl post. Perhaps Petri was right after all, and the Dark Lord had much more important concerns now.

“Since we are down here,” Petri said, “you may as well practise controlling an inferius.”

Harry’s mouth went dry, and he wondered if protesting that they hadn’t had breakfast yet would be valid. Probably not, he decided, and said instead, “Er, in case it doesn’t work, is there some other way to, er, not die?”

“Inferi dislike fire,” Petri told him, “But rest assured that I have Ulrich well under control.”

“Fire, really?” Harry asked. “But if you can just drive them off with _incendio_ , how are they, er, useful?”

When they had lived in Germany, Petri had made inferi for other dark wizards all the time, usually for the purpose of guarding important things, so Harry had assumed that the average wizard would be unable to deal with one.

“You cannot just ‘drive them off,’ with _incendio_ ,” Petri repeated with a laugh, “At best it will buy you a moment of distraction so that you can escape. You may destroy them with fire, but as they are not flammable, you would need a strong and continuous magical flame.”

Harry nodded, remembering that the regular fire conjured by the fire-making charm would last only a moment without fuel to burn, while the long-lasting bluebell flame would refuse to actually burn anything at all.

“Anyway, there will be no need for any fire. You will find that a single inferius is easily stopped by the imperius curse,” Petri said, “which is why anybody sensible will have more than one at hand.”

He pulled open Ulrich’s drawer, stood back, and cast the imperius curse himself. Ulrich crawled out of the box, not standing up but crouching with his hands on the ground, his milky eyes staring up sightlessly and his teeth bared in a grimace. He looked more or less like a deranged human, courtesy of the preservation potion in his veins, but Harry knew that his enchanted body could move with incredible alacrity and unrelenting force, heedless of damage that would fell any living person.

Ulrich advanced slowly, crawling like hunting cat, and Harry remembered that he was supposed to be doing something about it.

“ _Imperio_ ,” he incanted, and immediately felt the warm thread running from his head to his wand. Ulrich stopped, and stood up, his expression smoothing out. For a moment, they stared at each other, but then the inferius lunged, and Harry stumbled backwards with a yell. “ _Imperio!_ ” he screamed again, and Ulrich came to an abrupt stop before scuttling backwards. Harry took a shaky breath, waiting for another attack.

He was not disappointed. The moment the inferius reached the table, he suddenly bounded forward again. Harry tried to force him back with a thought, but it didn’t work, and he abandoned his position and leapt to the side as Ulrich snarled and struck out with his arm.

“Take control,” Petri advised from the sidelines in a level tone, as if he were bored by the proceedings.

Harry tried to stand his ground, but this proved to be a mistake because Ulrich was then upon him, squeezing his body in a punishing grip. He struggled and gasped for air, but it was impossible to break the supernaturally strong embrace, and it was all he could do to keep a hold of his wand and his wits. The connection was still there— _let go,_ he thought furiously, pulling at the thread,  _let go of me!_

Ulrich released him quite suddenly, and he tumbled to the floor, wheezing and trying to shake out the ringing in his ears. Harry kept his wand pointed at the inferius, annoyed at himself for losing his composure.  It was just a dead body, an enchanted object. He shouldn’t have been threatened by it when he knew how it should be controlled.

Nonetheless, his heart thudded insistently in his chest, and the inferius reached out again, slowly this time. Harry trained his wand on the offending arm, bracing himself against the wall so that he could slide back to his feet without looking away.  _No. Stop. Go away,_ he thought firmly. The arm retreated.

There was a sudden pop, and Rosenkol appeared in the middle of the room. Momentarily distracted, Harry yelled as Ulrich’s fist slammed into the wall inches away from his head, sending splinters of wood flying. Petri whipped around in alarm and Ulrich stepped back, stumbling and then crawling back into his drawer, which Petri kicked shut.

“What is it?” Petri demanded, turning to Rosenkol, who was glancing around the room with wide eyes. The elf held up a letter clutched in his spindly hand.

“Master, Rosenkol is sorry to be interrupting. There is being an urgent note from Mister Igor,” Rosenkol said. Petri took the letter and tore it open, his scowl deepening as he scanned it. He levitated it and set it on fire in midair, before he made for the exit, gesturing for Harry to follow him.

“I’ll be gone for a few days. I trust you can take care of yourself with Rosenkol’s aid. I’m sure Vlaicu will be eager to help you as well, if you need anything,” Petri said.

“What?” Harry muttered, glancing back to Rosenkol, whose face betrayed no surprise. “Why? Where are you going?”

“Norway, to deal with an emergency,” Petri explained without actually explaining. They exited the trunk, and he locked it and picked it up, obviously intending to take it with him. “Try not to get yourself killed in my absence. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“I won’t,” said Harry. Petri threw on his cloak and boots and apparated on the spot, leaving Harry to stare at empty air. He turned to Rosenkol. “What was that about?”

“Master is helping his friend. Rosenkol is not to be saying more,” said the elf. “Wizardling is wanting breakfast?”

Now that he wasn’t in danger of being mauled by an inferius, Harry remembered that he was, in fact, very hungry. “Yes, if you wouldn’t mind. Do you want help? Hold on, isn’t all the food in the trunk?”

The location of the food was apparently no obstacle to Rosenkol, who snapped his fingers and produced an assortment of bowls along with a sack of flour, some eggs, and oil. Not for the first time, Harry marvelled at how powerful Rosenkol’s magic actually was.

Harry rifled through the loose pages of the recipe book that Mrs Figg had sent him. It was charmingly muggle, written in pen on a spiral-bound notebook with stained pages and apparently a copy of the collective works of the neighbourhood housewives. Harry wondered if it contained any contributions from Aunt Petunia.

Curious, he searched for drop scones and discovered a suspiciously familiar recipe. Certainly, drop scones were not exactly complicated, but that only meant that there had to be hundreds of variations, many of which did not include lemon zest or a dash of vanilla. Harry distinctly recalled Sunday mornings spent sweating in front of the griddle, frantically sliding hot scones onto  plates before Dudley and Uncle Vernon could empty  them down their endless gullets and begin complaining.

He’d never got to try a proper one, piping hot and topped with butter and compote instead of cold and plain.

“Let’s make drop scones,” he told Rosenkol. “And apple jam.”

While Rosenkol prepared the batter, Harry dug  _Witch’s Brew_ out from under his bed and searched for how to make pancakes and crepes. Goldstein recommended using the hover charm to keep the batter suspended while casting the rotation and hot-air charms to cook it through evenly, before applying a quick scorching charm to achieve a golden-brown finish.

That was two new charms, which was not promising, but Harry dutifully went to the  _Compendium_ to look them up. The rotation charm simply spun something in place, while the scorching charm shot two plumes of fire out of the wand and was apparently intended to be a duelling spell. He glanced sceptically at his cooking guide. In any case, he supposed it would be a useful spell, whether for searing drop scones or deterring inferi.

“All right, you boil the apples and I’ll make the scones,” Harry told Rosenkol, pointing his wand at the bowl of batter. He found it prohibitively difficult to hover part of the liquid instead of the entire bowl, and tried pulling up a strand of batter with the siphoning charm instead. This proved more effective, and soon he had a hovering globule. “ _Circumrota_ ,” he cast, and yelped as the batter splattered everywhere.

“Wizardling is spinning it too quickly,” Rosenkol told him unnecessarily, and then cleaned up the mess with a quick scouring charm that left a bitter, soapy taste in Harry’s mouth.

Once he managed to slow the rotation charm, it was easy enough to heat the hovering disc into a fluffy cake. Harry bit his lip, hesitating to try the next charm. If the scorching charm was supposed to be an attack, its natural range was probably very far. He did not want to explain Petri (or Silviu) how he had burned down their house trying to make breakfast.

“ _Aduro_ ,” he incanted carefully, and twin tongues of flame puffed out the end of his wand, thankfully not extending more than a few inches before fizzling out. Relieved by this success, he directed the spell to his drop scone, which promptly blackened. Harry winced, levitating the scone to a plate and prodding at it. The outside layer flaked off and showed pale yellow beneath. It was probably still edible.

Harry burned a few more scones before he managed to restrain his scorching charm sufficiently. It helped when he did not aim directly at the food. By then, Rosenkol had completed his task with far fewer mishaps.

“Wizardling is improving,” Rosenkol said, pouring fresh apple jam over the stack of drop scones and providing Harry with a fork.

“Rosenkol is, too,” said Harry, digging in. It was delicious despite its simplicity. That, or he was starving after so much magic practice. “The jam is brilliant.”

After breakfast, Harry thought that he should perhaps apologise to Shy and Ness for his abrupt departure the previous morning, and assure them again that Petri wasn’t a danger. He told Rosenkol that he was going out, threw on his cloak, and headed for Shyverwretch’s Venoms and Poisons.

As it was nearly midnight, Knockturn Alley was fairly lively. Hags were peddling their wares from tiny wheeled kiosks, and witches and wizards were stumbling about in various states of drunkenness. The sour smell of alcohol wafted heavily out of the White Wyvern’s open door, mingling with the stench of rancid rubbish.

Harry wrinkled his nose and hurried along, pausing to glance curiously at the well-lit interior of Crystal Wonders. A stocky boy whose build reminded Harry of Cassius Warrington stood behind the counter, looking rather bored. Harry continued on his way before the boy could spot him through the window and make any awkward eye contact. 

Just as he passed out of the rectangle of light shed by Petri’s shop, he noticed a black-clad figure with a cane and a familiar mop of blond hair enter Borgin and Burke’s next door. Had that been Lucius Malfoy?

Harry regretted not carrying his invisibility cloak around everywhere, though of course that would be terribly impractical. He then reasoned that he had every right to walk into the shop himself as a potential customer. Just in case, he rummaged around in his pockets to check if he had money, and felt the reassuring coolness of sickles and the indented surface of knuts.

As he pushed open the door and sent off a surprisingly normal-sounding bell, the shopkeeper and the other wizard, who had been in heated conversation just a moment before, abruptly fell silent.

“Are you lost, boy?” the shopkeeper—not Borgin, but a short old man, so it was probably Burke—barked after a moment.

“No,” said Harry. “I’m looking for…” he paused as he glanced around the shop, trying to come up with something plausible. His eye caught on a shelf in the back, full of dusty tomes. “…a book.”

“What book?” asked Burke, narrowing his eyes. Harry pretended to glance nervously at the other occupant of the shop, who was, in fact, Lucius Malfoy, and who looked rather annoyed at being interrupted.

Harry suddenly had a thought about exactly what kind of book he really would be interested in getting his hands on, except that the topic was perhaps too dark even for the likes of Burke. Now, his trepidation was not feigned. “I’ll have a look around, and let you know if I find what I want,” he said, and made straight for the bookshelf. Burke looked torn, but did not seem ready to kick him out immediately, so Harry counted it as a success.

Now, what kind of book would have information about horcruxes?

Petri did not own such a book, Harry was sure. He had never given Harry so much as a single page to read on anything that he considered part of the “other” arts, whether enchantment, conjuration, or divination, and Harry understood that all his knowledge was oral, of the sort passed from master to student, generation after generation.

Harry refused to believe that  _nobody_ had ever written on those topics, however. They could not be any more dangerous than what was in  _Secrets of the Hieroglyphical Figures_ , a book which he had only realised too late contained incredibly rare and powerful information. The philosopher’s stone was one way to delay death, and the horcrux was just another.

‘Do not touch – objects may be cursed,’ read a sign above the books. Harry bit his lip and wished he could do the sort of wizard reading that Vince seemed so naturally capable of. He stared at the spines, most of which were unmarked, and tried to divine the contents of the books just by looking.

“Mr Malfoy,” Burke said lowly, though it was no use in the otherwise silent shop to try and keep from being overheard, “I don’t understand why you would be looking to associate with such… filth. I am sure we could provide superior services.”

“The quality of your services is not in question,” said Malfoy. Harry surreptitiously cupped his hand to the side of his glasses, as if pushing them up, and activated the dizzying feature that allowed him to see behind himself, but mirrored. He was certain he would not be able to take one step like this without falling on his face, but fortunately, he did not need to.

Malfoy glanced to Harry but, finding his back turned, seemed to be assured that he was not being observed. Leaning forward, he whispered to Burke, “ _He_ is interested in them, and it would not do to refuse his request.” Malfoy pushed his sleeve up slightly, as if to show Burke his arm. The shopkeeper sucked in a sharp breath.

“Fine,” said Burke, “but you let _him_ know that we are always ready to step in if they prove lacking. You’ll want to go across the street, to the coffin store. That’s where their leader is.”

He was talking about Silviu, Harry realised. And who could the person Malfoy and Burke spoke about in such hushed tones be, but the Dark Lord?

“They work for free, you understand,” Malfoy told Burke, as if regretful, and turned to leave. Burke nodded stiffly.

Harry tapped his glasses to return his vision to normal and took a few moments to peruse the bookshelf with more focus. If he really stared at one book, he thought he was actually getting some vague impression about it. For example, there was a book bound in dark red leather that gave him the horrible feeling of insects crawling down his spine. It seemed to be about potions.

“So,” said Burke from right behind him, and Harry jumped. “Find what you were looking for?”

“Not really,” Harry said, trying to seem casual. This close up, Harry realised that Burke was not uncommonly short, only very bent over, so that his head was barely higher than Harry’s. He hesitated, and wondered if perhaps he could just ask, after all. Burke seemed discreet, and Harry did not think that books could actually be illegal, whatever kind of dark magic they described. “Do you have anything about horcruxes?”

“I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the term,” Burke said, straightening just a bit to look him in the eye through his long grey fringe. Harry did not think he was lying, but one couldn’t be sure with a character like Burke.

“They’ve got something to do with souls,” Harry told him.

“A philosophical book is what you’re looking for, then?” Burke asked.

“No, a book about actual magic,” said Harry.

“Magic that’s got to do with souls,” Burke muttered, giving him a searching look. He seemed to come to some kind of decision. “Apologies, lad, but books like that aren’t easy to come by. They’d mostly be collections of personal notes from some nasty wizards. You’d best not let on to just anybody that you’re interested in such things. Some would get the wrong idea.”

“I understand,” said Harry, surprised by the honest advice. Burke smiled with half his face, showing a row of crooked but pearly teeth. “Thank you for your help, sir.”

“You’re welcome. You have a good evening, lad,” Burke told him, and saw him out of the shop without even trying to sell him anything else.

Harry headed straight for Silviu’s. It was his lucky night, because Malfoy was still there, right in front of the counter. He whirled around at the sound of the funeral bells, and his eyes widened at the sight of Harry. Before he could make some accusation, Silviu said, “Harry! Not that you’re not welcome, but now isn’t the best time. Could you come back in, say, half an hour?”

A little annoyed at being promptly kicked out, Harry said, “My uncle’s gone on a trip suddenly, and I was wondering if I could stay with you.”

He felt only a little bad when Silviu’s expression softened and he said, “Oh, of course, here… how about you go in the back for a bit while I handle some business?”

Harry nodded and went into the back room, only to immediately press his ear to the door and activate the piercing-eye enchantment on his glasses, for good measure. He did not doubt that Silviu knew what he was up to, but the vampire was not exactly in a position to do anything about it at the moment.

“That boy has been following me,” he heard Malfoy say.

“He lives in the Alley,” Silviu said. “I am hardly surprised you saw him around. Please, continue with what you were saying. You understand that I would require some kind of proof?”

Malfoy nodded, suppressing his distaste admirably, though it still leaked from the  tightened edges of his lips. He reached for his sleeve and Harry narrowed his eyes, trying to catch a glimpse of whatever it was he was showing on his arm. All he could see was something reddish on the pale skin.

“I’d heard rumours about such a mark,” Silviu murmured. “Very well. But I still wish to meet him in person to discuss the details. Would that be agreeable to him?”

Malfoy nodded jerkily. “I will inform him of the conditions of your acceptance.”

“Very good. Thank you,” said Silviu with a short bow. Malfoy inclined his head briefly before he departed through the floo.

When the fire flared orange again, Harry opened the door and hurried up to the counter, making no pretence of not having listened in on the conversation.

“So the Dark Lord’s already asked for your help?” Harry asked. Silviu nodded, frowning.

“What were you doing, following Malfoy around? That man is dangerous,” he said. Harry frowned back. So Silviu had believed Malfoy, despite his verbal dismissal of the man’s concerns.

“I wasn’t,” Harry said. “Well, all right, I was, but only for a few minutes. I saw him go into Borgin and Burke’s and I went in after him, then came here. I wasn’t lying that my uncle, I mean, my master left. Said it was an emergency and he’ll be gone for a few days.”

“Burke’s not one of us,” Silviu hissed. “You can’t just waltz into his shop.”

“I was a customer,” Harry protested. “I pretended to want to buy something, and I’m pretty sure he believed me.” Harry carefully did not think too hard about what he had tried to buy, focusing instead on Burke’s face. “And how did you know it was him, not Borgin?” he asked, wondering if Silviu was still managing to read his mind.

“Burke works nights,” said Silviu. “Just be careful. You can’t let Borgin or Burke find out that you have anything to do with us. They _loathe_ us, and the fact that we own so much of the alley. If they had an easy way of getting to us…”

Harry remembered suddenly Ness’s panic at discovering what Silviu had done, that he could be given the kiss for assaulting a wizard.

Silviu winced,  and Harry realised he had made eye contact for too long.

“I still don’t understand why you bit me,” Harry said, looking away. “You keep apologising but you didn’t explain.”

Silviu looked confused. “I told you, I was trying to get you away from your master. The bond, it makes you neither dead nor alive, in a way. You can’t be tracked by any spell.”

Harry vaguely remembered that Petri had mentioned this before. But why would Silviu know such a thing, unless… “Is that what you did for Annette, too? To get her away from her father?”

Silviu nodded. “To protect her, in case he tries to look for her again. Yaxley—Ettie’s father, he’s… there’s no other word for it, he’s evil. Your master, he may be the same brand of dark wizard, but the more I get to know him, the more I understand that as a person, he’s nothing like Yaxley. He cares about you, and other people, in his own way. Yaxley doesn’t care about anybody but himself. I can’t count how many lives he’s ruined.”

“So what happened to him? Is he in Azkaban?” Harry asked.

Silviu laughed bitterly. “Azkaban? He’s a decorated auror, claimed to have been under the imperius curse during the Dark Lord’s rise. Ridiculous, when he was probably the one who cast most of those imperius curses in the first place.”

“Oh,” Harry muttered faintly, ever more aware of how little stood between him and people who could easily destroy him and everything he knew.

“Don’t worry,” Silviu added, “He doesn’t care about us. After he threw Ettie away like so much rubbish, he never did come back to check on her. Probably thinks she’s dead.”

“But he works for the Dark Lord,” Harry said. “What if you have to talk to him at a meeting, or something?”

Silviu shook his head. “The Dark Lord sends the likes of Malfoy for friendly meetings. I wager he would only send Yaxley if the meeting was going to end with you dead or imperiused.”

“Sounds like a real pleasant fellow,” said Harry faintly. “So what did Malfoy say the Dark Lord wanted?”

“More or less what we expected. Pro bono procurement services,” Silviu said. Harry stared at him blankly.

“What does that mean?”

“That we’ll get him whatever materials he needs. Potions ingredients, ritual items—if it can be bought or even it cannot be bought, we will provide to the best of our abilities,” Silviu explained in more detail.

“How does that work?” Harry asked, astonished at the breadth of that service.

“First, we need a lot of money. Not galleons,” Silviu said, making a moue of distaste at the mention of the currency, “but pounds. Real money that grows.”

“Er, I think pounds are printed, not grown,” Harry said, but Silviu laughed.

“I mean interest. Feneration. Are you familiar with the concept?” the vampire asked, an unholy glint in his eye.

“Interest, like when you put money in the bank and they pay you?” Harry asked. Come to think of it, there wasn’t anything like interest for his galleons in Gringotts. In fact, if he recalled correctly, he had to pay the goblins a fee for the privilege of keeping a vault there.

“That, but really it’s when you lend somebody money, and they have to pay you back more than what they borrowed,” Silviu said. “It’s only fair after all—that money wasn’t theirs in the first place, so they have to pay for the opportunity to use it.”

Harry nodded. That made sense.

“Goblins don’t see it that way. They think feneration—they’ll call it usury—is theft, and they used to execute people for it. Barbarians. That’s why the wizarding world still guards its gold like dragons guard treasure, as if you could steal somebody’s wealth away from them so easily. Wealth is not gold, it’s not things, wealth is credit. Credit means you’ll keep your promises, you’ll pay your debts. That’s value.”

Harry stared in awe at Silviu’s rare moment of passion, the sort that he was beginning to realise only came out when the vampire was ranting about goblins. He sort of saw Silviu’s point, at least a little.

Something of the Dark Lord’s views echoed in those thoughts as well. Promises and loyalty; rewards for help and punishments for failure; not forgiveness, but repayment.

“So we’re forced to use muggle money,” Silviu continued, rolling his eyes. “Unbelievable, that muggles are more advanced in this regard than wizards, but that’s the reality. To change galleons to pounds, we first buy ingredients for some key potions—the elixir to induce euphoria is the main one, and then we brew them and sell them in the muggle world.”

“What? Isn’t that against the Statute of Secrecy?” Harry asked, aghast. “And I thought potions don’t work on muggles.”

“We don’t market them as magic potions, obviously,” said Silviu. “We sell them in little capsules, like muggle pills. And potions don’t work on muggles in the same way that they work on wizards, but they certainly do work. Actually, the euphoria elixir works much better on muggles. They get the same high with a tenth of the dose.”

Harry had the niggling thought that there was something off about this arrangement. He vaguely remembered Aunt Petunia warning Dudley about a similar matter. “You’re selling drugs? To muggles?” he asked.

Silviu nodded. “It’s good for everybody. The euphoria elixir is much safer than the rubbish that they would otherwise be taking, and it works better too. It’s exactly as good every time, no diminishing effect from overuse.”

“And this potion is legal?” Harry asked.

“Perfectly legal. Like I said, it doesn’t work as well on wizards. It’s basically the same as the cheering charm,” Silviu assured him. Harry nodded, feeling more in his depth. They had covered the cheering charm in charms club towards the end of the year. It made the target feel upbeat and giddy, but it wasn’t anything to write home about. In Harry’s experience, it failed to actually emulate true happiness or pleasure.

“All right, so you sell this potion to muggles, to get muggle money. And then what?” Harry asked.

“Then we use that money to make us more money, through speculation and arbitrage. This part really is illegal, if you must know, since it’s breaking the goblin treaty about usury. But as I’ve just explained, I think we’re quite justified there,” Silviu said.

Harry nodded, unable, in principle, to disagree. “It’s that easy?”

Silviu chuckled. “It’s not easy, but we have experts helping us. One of our squib contacts is a stockbroker, and  he has banker  friends . Hags also have a great eye for deals. Leticia’s group helps us find arbitrage—I mean, they look for cases where we can buy something for cheap in the muggle world and sell it for more in the wizarding world, or vice versa.”

Harry’s head was reeling with the apparently huge scope of the company’s operations.

“Er, wow,” he said. “So what kinds of supplies does the Dark Lord need?”

“I remember last time it was mostly various healing potions, polyjuice potion, and veritaserum,” Silviu said. “The last two are normally tricky but we only had to supply the ingredients. The Dark Lord had his own brewer.”

“What do those potions do?” Harry asked.

“Polyjuice potion lets you turn into somebody else temporarily—very useful for subterfuge, as you could imagine. Veritaserum forces the drinker to tell the truth,” Silviu told him.

“Oh,” said Harry. Both potions seemed vaguely horrifying in the wrong hands. Silviu nodded.

“All the more reason not to be an enemy of the Dark Lord,” he said.

Now if only Harry could figure out how not to end up as an enemy of the Dark Lord.

“Is there something I can do to help, then?” Harry asked.

“You don’t need to do anything,” Silviu said quickly, but Harry shook his head.

“But if I want to?” he pressed.

“Well, I suppose you can help Ettie with the euphoria elixirs. They’re making them at the friends’ house,” Silviu told him. “You remember the way there?”

Harry nodded.

The friends’ house was down the alley past all the shops and past the graveyard. At night, it looked even grimmer than it had during the day, with dim orange candlelight spilling out of its cracks and casting long, twisting shadows across the overgrown courtyard. The gate was locked, but a quick  _alohamora_ was enough to gain him entrance.

He knocked on the door uncertainly, and then saw that there was a string hanging from the roof, which perhaps led to a bell, so he pulled that as well and heard distant chiming.

After a rather long wait, during which he wondered if he should perhaps leave, the door opened up to reveal a lanky, freckled boy.

“I remember you,” he said, after looking Harry up and down. “you were with the chairman that one time. Are you a new friend? I’m Sean by the way.”

“Er, Harry. And no, I’m er, part of the company. Sil—the chairman said I could help make potions,” said Harry.

Sean shook his hand enthusiastically. “Part of the company already, really? Wow. Come in. We’re cooking on the third floor.”

He led Harry inside, up two creaky flights of narrow wooden stairs and into an attic space. It was very foggy with golden potion fumes, despite the open window, and crowded with friends, all bent over gigantic cauldrons that had been set atop the same round heating elements that they used at Hogwarts.

“Are you all wizards?” Harry asked, confused. He was sure that muggles and squibs could not brew potions. Sean laughed.

“Wizards? I wish. Nah. We’re just doing the grunt work. Annette’s doing all the hocus pocus stuff,” he said.

Harry was impressed by the factory-like setup. There was a station for ingredient preparation on the far side of the room, and then a sorting and measuring area, and friends ferrying ingredients from table to cauldron while others stirred and kept time. He spotted Annette standing by the window, casting  _ventus_ in an attempt to clear the fumes.

“You want to try stirring? I think that’s the easiest,” Sean said.

“Er, I think the chairman probably wanted me to help Annette,” Harry guessed, producing his wand. Sean’s eyes bugged out at the sight.

“Blimey! You’re a wizard!” he exclaimed, smacking his forehead. “I should’ve realised. Ah, well, I s’pose I should be getting back to work.”

Sean scurried off, shoulders a little hunched. Harry thought for a disconcerting moment that the boy might be afraid of him. Harry made his way towards Annette, staying at the perimeter of the room to avoid getting in the way.

“Hey, Annette,” Harry called. Annette turned and did a double-take, her brows knitting together.

“Harry—what are you doing here? Did Silviu send you?” She sounded disapproving, so Harry shook his head.

“I wanted to come help,” he said, “if you think I can.”

“Oh,” she said, expression defrosting somewhat. “I could use a hand, or rather, a wand, if you’re willing. You know how to cheer people up with magic?”

“The cheering charm?” Harry asked. “I know that.”

“Yes, that’s probably it,” said Annette. “When the potion’s brewed for thirty-three minutes and it’s very light green, you’ve got to add that spell. It’ll go bright yellow, and they’ll be ready to add the sopophorous bean juice. Twelve more minutes and you need to mix all the ingredients with your wand, you know, to finish up the potion. Look, I’ll show you, that one’s ready.”

Annette walked him over to the second cauldron on the left side, where a girl was waving frantically. Taking out her springy wand, she made a moue of concentration and waved it in a frankly nonsensical way that looked nothing like the cheering charm’s cadence. The lime green potion did turn suddenly yellow, however, and the girl who had been brewing the potion quickly poured in a dash of oily silver liquid and stirred vigorously.

Wiping some sweat from her brow, Annette limped back towards her previous position by the window. “We’ve got it timed to every tenth and twelfth minute for the two spells,” she told Harry. “If you could do the… cheering charm, you said? I can do the combining.”

“Are you sure it’s the cheering charm?” Harry asked. “I er, don’t remember the wand movement looking like that.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Annette. “Why don’t you cast your spell on me and we’ll see if it’s right?”

“ _Euphero,_ ” said Harry, obliging despite his scepticism, and a laugh bubbled out of Annette’s mouth. She smiled and nodded.

“That seems fine. Thanks, by the way. I suppose I needed that,” she said. “Oh. That’s my cue.” A friend at the next cauldron had his hand raised, but in a fist. Harry guessed that the open hand meant a cheering charm was needed, while a closed one was a potion acceleration.

Annette returned soon enough. “I was wondering… your uncle let you come here on your own?” she asked.

“He’s not around,” Harry told her. “Had to go out of the country. But yes, I suppose he’s been letting me go around on my own. Why?”

“He’s not afraid of you running away?” she asked.

“To where?” Harry replied, trying to think of some possibility.

“To us?” said Annette, eyebrows raised. Harry blinked. He supposed that it was a valid option, in principle, only not one that he felt he could consider.

“But he lives like, right there,” he said lamely, pointing towards the interior wall.

“He wouldn’t be able to find you even if you were right next door,” Annette said.

Harry was sceptical about that—he might be impossible to find with magic, but logic would do well enough in this case.

“I don’t want to run away, though,” he finally said. Living with Petri was better than not living with him. Petri was teaching him things, things he needed to know. “He’s my teacher.”

“I suppose… you’re good at magic,” Annette said after a pause. She had a sort of pained expression on her face. “Sometimes I still think about what it would’ve been like if I were the kind of witch my father could be proud of,” she said, laughing under her breath. “Silviu would throw a fit if he knew.”

“Er, you seem pretty good at magic too,” Harry said. “I don’t understand why there’s a, er, problem.”

Annette snorted. “I’m practically a squib,” she said. “I didn’t get accepted to Hogwarts. Father even wrote the headmaster. He was so furious, so convinced there had been a mistake, but I knew there hadn’t. It takes me so long to gather enough magic even to do basic things.”

Gather magic? Harry remembered how the Dark Lord had used his body to cast spells that were in theory beyond his ability by first collecting extra magic. Hadn’t he said that it was an advanced technique?

“But it’s really impressive that you can gather magic,” Harry said. “I have no idea how to do that.”

Annette gave him an odd look. “How do you do cast spells then?”

Harry was not sure how to explain something so fundamental that he had never thought about it. “I just… do,” he said, feeling that it would be even more foolish to tell her that he simply waved his wand and said the incantation until the spell worked. It wasn’t really that simple, but nor could he articulate what else was required.

“It just comes naturally to you?” Annette asked. Harry shook his head.

“I wouldn’t say that. I mean, I have to practise,” he said.

“But what are you practising?” Annette asked, apparently mystified.

Harry, now also puzzled, said, “Spells? Do you not practise spells?”

“I use spells when I need them,” Annette said uncertainly. “I don’t go out of my way to just cast them. What’s the point of that?”

“To get better at them?” Harry said, thinking this to be self-evident.

Just then, he caught sight of somebody waving, and excused himself to go cast the cheering charm. He waved his wand over the cauldron with some trepidation, but the potion changed colour as expected.

“I don’t think magic works like that,” Annette told him when he returned. “Even if you did the same thing a hundred times, or one time, that doesn’t mean it will or won’t work the next time you try.”

That seemed patently false to Harry, but he wasn’t sure how to object. If Annette thought that no matter how many successes there were, that that was not evidence that the next try would be a success, then how could anything convince her otherwise?

Annette seemed to take his silence as acceptance, and did not attempt to continue their conversation. Harry cast his cheering charms at ten minute intervals until the last five cauldrons of potion were complete, and then he left the friends to package them into little capsules. He tried to find Sean and say goodbye, but the older boy only waved shyly, suddenly reticent.

On Harry’s return to the graveyard, he spotted Rosenkol standing in plain sight on top of the coffin house door, pacing back and forth. The elf whipped around as Harry emerged fully from the yew grove and crossed the twenty metres separating them with a snap of his fingers and an echoing pop.

“Rosenkol is looking everywhere for wizardling,” said the elf, wringing his hands. “Where has he been?”

“Er, I was at the friends. Down the alley, there’s this house,” Harry said, blinking in confusion. “You couldn’t find me?” He had been under the impression that house elves could just spontaneously apparate to people. How else could Petri use Rosenkol to deliver letters?

Rosenkol shook his head violently, tugging at his ears. “Wizardling is being hidden unless he calls for Rosenkol.”

Harry wondered if this was another consequence of his blood bond with Silviu. He supposed it must be, otherwise it would be a very pointless sort of protection, if any house elf could just find him. But what about owls? How did owls find people? Harry was sure that he could still receive post, because letters and presents from friends had reached him just fine before.

Rosenkol was staring at him unblinkingly, so Harry said, “Why were you looking for me?”

“Rosenkol is having a favour to ask Wizardling. It is not being proper but Rosenkol is already a bad elf, and Wizardling is being the best one to ask,” Rosenkol muttered.

“Go on,” said Harry, curious and unconcerned about propriety.

“Rosenkol’s friend Vinky is looking for the Dark Lord for her master. He is also not being easily found. No elf is being able to help her, they are sighing and shaking their heads that she will have to punish herself, because the Dark Lord is dead and she is not finding him. But Rosenkol knows the Dark Lord is being alive, and he is not wanting Vinky to fail,” Rosenkol explained in a rush.

“Oh. Well, I’d love to help, but I don’t actually know _where_ the Dark Lord is,” Harry told him.

“Perhaps Wizardling will agree to be meeting Vinky at least?” Rosenkol asked.

“All right,” Harry agreed. He did not exactly have anything better to do.

Rosenkol’s eyes lit up. “Wizardling is most kind. Vinky will be very happy. She will not be having to be sad any more.”

The elf held out his hand, and Harry took it, bracing himself for apparition. It was much smoother and shorter than he had anticipated, and they emerged across the street from the White Wyvern at the juncture to Horizont Alley, in front of some tall and crooked buildings which Harry had never paid much mind to. Rosenkol led Harry up to a dusty shopfront whose sign, at eye-level and in faded black lettering painted onto  a sooty plank , read, “Chimney Sweep Elf.”

Rosenkol knocked and the door swung open immediately. A house elf wearing a grimy pillowcase ran up to the threshold and then squeaked, eyes wide as billiard balls, when he noticed Harry.

“I is looking for Vinky,” Rosenkol said in heavily accented English. Harry did a double-take at the use of the first-person pronoun.

The other elf was still glancing back and forth between him and Rosenkol, looking a little offended. After a moment, he said, “ _Winky_ is being in the back. Mobsy will be getting her. Would sir like to come in?”

“Er, sure,” said Harry, ducking slightly to avoid hitting his head on the extremely low door frame.

The inside wasn’t much to look at, all dark and dingy. The main feature was a gigantic, unlit fireplace taking up the entire back wall. It looked even larger juxtaposed with  the compressed scale of the room —Harry’s head brushed the ceiling when he stood up straight. There were some charred logs lying in the grate and an assortment of pokers, skewers, and brushes leaned up against the side of the fireplace. The only furniture was a run-down tea table and a pair of stools that looked like little more than tree stumps which somebody had half-heartedly sanded down.

Mobsy returned in a minute with a tea set and another elf in tow. He snapped his fingers and a cracked teapot poured dark tea into a chipped cup.

“Refreshment for you, sir,” he said, and the tea levitated over to Harry, who felt like it would be rude to refuse.

“Thanks,” he said. Mobsy’s eyes widened. Harry pretended not to notice, and stared into his teacup, trying to determine if it was clean, and whether he should really drink it or not.

“Winky!” said Rosenkol. For some reason both Mobsy and the new elf glanced to Harry and got offended looks again. The other elf, presumably Winky, did not respond. She had deep bags under her eyes, which were red and swollen, like she’d been crying.

“Winky, this is being Harry, my master’s pupil,” said Rosenkol. “He is agreeing to help your master.”

Winky’s tired eyes widened at that, and she turned to Harry. “Kind sir, you is really helping? Winky will take you to Master!”

“Wait, wait,” Harry said, having only agreed to meet Winky, and nothing else yet. “I don’t know if I can actually help, but I said I’d hear you out. First, who exactly is your master?”

Winky withdrew her hand, looking suddenly hesitant, and Harry felt a little bad. She stepped closer, very slowly. “Winky is… Winky is sorry!” she cried, and then lunged. Unprepared, Harry choked as he was stuffed through the constricting tube of apparition, the distant sound of a shattering teacup barely reached his ears before it was cut off entirely.

His last thought, before he was struck by a burst of red light, was that he had to be the only person ever who was stupid enough to be kidnapped by a house elf.


	38. Summoner

Harry woke up to find himself tied up on a chair, unfortunately not for the first time,  though he doubted that he was lucky enough to have been apprehended by somebody like Nicolas Flamel again.  He opened his eyes a crack.  The room he was in was dark, illuminated only by the faint blue glow of starlight through sheer curtains, and sparsely but elegantly furnished.

“Winky tells me you said you could help me,” said somebody. Harry turned his head to try to find the speaker, even though he knew full well that the voice had come from in front of him. He did not see anybody. There was only a stiff-looking couch, a matching armchair, and an immaculately maintained fireplace behind him. Disillusionment, perhaps, or an invisibility cloak?

“I said I could try,” Harry ground out, not feeling very helpful at the moment. Then he decided that it made no sense to cling to reckless indignation when caution was far likelier to get him out in one piece. “Rosen—my elf told me you were looking for the Dark Lord. I don’t know where he is right now, but I have a good idea of where he will be.”

It occurred to him as he said it he had no idea why this mysterious man—for the voice was clearly masculine—was interested in the Dark Lord. Was he a follower or an enemy? Which situation would even be preferable?

“You’re a kid. How could you know that?” asked the man. Harry hesitated, cognisant that what he revealed could bring considerable harm to Silviu and the whole company. What if this man was some kind of dark wizard hunter? It seemed unlikely that somebody on the right side of the law would stoop to kidnapping children, but if a necromancer like Yaxley was an auror…

He steeled himself and asked, “Are you on the Dark Lord’s side?” Any moment now, he would be cursed, he thought, but the man just chuckled erratically in a way that reminded him of Leticia.

To Harry’s surprise, a hand appeared in mid-air, and like a veil  had fallen  away, a grinning man clad in nothing but a white nightgown stepped out from under an invisibility cloak with a flourish. He threw the cloak to the ground and stuck out his arm, where Harry saw a fairly distinct, reddish skull with a snake apparently scarred into the flesh. He made the connection—Lord Voldemort, touching Quirrell’s arm, Lucius Malfoy, showing Burke and Silviu something there—it was some kind of brand that the Dark Lord put on his servants. Or rather, his ‘friends,’ as Harry recalled from his brief time occupying the Dark Lord’s mind, with more or less the same connotation used by Silviu.

Harry nodded to the man. “You’re one of his friends,” he said, and the man’s eyebrows jumped up into his hairline, though he continued smiling, as if pleased.

“And what about you, kid?” he asked.

Harry chose his words carefully. “I don’t know if I… deserve to be his friend yet, but I would like to be.”

“So we’re on the same side,” said the man.

Harry, still tied up, did not feel like he was there yet, that there was something off. His fate had never included kidnapping by house elf, so he was sure enough that he would get out of here alive. What happened afterwards was another question, a more important one.

“If you’re really a friend of the Dark Lord though, how come you don’t know where he is?” Harry asked. “He had a meeting just this—tonight.”

He braced himself for some kind of retribution for his insolent questioning, but the man surprised him again, looking very anguished.

“I know! I felt my master’s call—it freed me—it let me take my revenge at last! But I was wandless. I couldn’t go to him. When I finally arrived there, he was already gone. I didn’t know what to do…” he was rambling, almost talking to himself, but then he seemed to notice Harry again. 

He took out his wand, but before Harry could be alarmed, he felt his bonds loosen and then vanish.

“Look kid, I think we got off on the wrong foot. I’m Barty,” said the man, sticking out his hand. Harry bit back some kind of sarcastic comment and took the hand.

“Harry,” he said. “I’ll help you find the Dark Lord, but you have to let me go. That’s fair, right?”

“Deal,” said Barty, a wide grin returning to his face. “You could start by telling me how you think you know where he’s going to be. Are your parents Death Eaters?”

Harry almost laughed at the absurdity of the question, but he managed to contain himself and shake his head. “I overheard Lucius Malfoy asking the vampires in Knockturn Alley to help the Dark Lord. They wanted to meet him in person, and Malfoy said he would ask.”

There. Nothing too overly compromising.

“When was this?” Barty asked with raised eyebrows.

“What time is it now?” Harry asked. He felt a twitch in his pocket and was surprised to realise that it was his wand trying to show the time. The man hadn’t even taken his wand? Then again, he supposed he was a child, and his wand hadn’t done him any good yet, anyway. He restrained the impulse to reach for it. He had to wait for a good opportunity.

“Nearly four in the morning,” said Barty, looking a bit peaky.

“Not long ago then. It was around midnight. There’s no way they’ve already had the meeting,” Harry said.

“And how are we going to find out where and when they’ll have it?” Barty demanded.

“We’ll ask?” Harry said. “You’ll have to bring us to Knockturn Alley, though.”

“Ask? You really think I can just waltz up to some vampires and ask to crash their meeting with the Dark Lord?”

“I can ask. I’m friends with them,” Harry said, though that was not the technically correct term. It seemed less complicated to put it that way.

Barty  furrowed his brows, but by the by his face loosened . “All right. Can’t say I expected that one. Do you think it would disrespectful to intrude on an arranged meeting? Maybe I should wait until Master summons us. But that could be months from now… I have to make an effort…”

Harry frowned. This man seemed to have his priorities all out of sorts.

“You want to find the Dark Lord, but you’re worried about being disrespectful?” he asked. “Shouldn’t you be worried that he thinks you’re a traitor?” He remembered looking so coldly at those empty spaces in the circle, the Death Eaters who had not returned.

“He thinks I’m dead,” said Barty. “And I would never betray him! If I didn’t care about being disrespectful, I would summon him this instant. I’d gladly take any punishment, just to see him again… but I already decided against it—he probably wouldn’t come. Why would he?”

“Summon him?” Harry asked.

“A privilege and honour, not to be misused,” Barty said, brushing back the sleeve of his nightgown again and gazing raptly at his scar. Closer now, Harry could see that the snake was actually coming out of the skull’s mouth, like a sinuous tongue. The whole design was crude, with just enough detail that the image was unmistakable, but it still looked like it would have been agonising to have it burned on. He remembered smoke coming off the Dark Lord’s finger as he marked Quirrell.

“Does it hurt?” Harry asked curiously.

“Only when it’s in use,” Barty said. “Hurt like the cruciatus the first time. That’s the torture curse.” He smiled as he said this.

“I know,” said Harry. Barty looked at him askance, his grin vanishing.

“You’re a strange kid,” he said. “What were you up to in Knockturn Alley, anyway, in the middle of the night?”

“I live there,” Harry said. “You’re a strange person too. Why did you have your elf kidnap me?”

“Sorry. I told her to bring me somebody who could take me to my master. She doesn’t like me much right now. I didn’t think she would go after a kid,” Barty said, scratching his head.

“She doesn’t like you?” Harry repeated suspiciously. Rosenkol’s story of how he had come not to like his old master came to mind, and it was not promising.

“Hey, you know about the cruciatus, how about the imperius curse?” Barty asked in lieu of answering directly. Harry narrowed his eyes and nodded.

“The enslavement curse,” he said.

“My father held me under the imperius curse for a decade,” Barty said. Harry’s jaw dropped. “My master’s summons freed me. I could think clearly for the first time in forever. I overpowered my father. I took his wand, and I killed him.”

There was a sob from the corner, and Harry turned to see the elf, Winky, suddenly there in plain sight, with tear tracks staining her face.

“Master Barty, you bad, bad boy,” she whispered, fresh tears welling up in her eyes. With no warning, she slammed her head backwards into the wall. “Bad Winky, bad Winky, Master Barty…” she trailed off into an incoherent wail.

“I don’t know why I told you all that, but it felt good to say it. No, that’s exactly why I told you. You’re the first person I’ve talked to in years besides Winky. Isn’t that depressing?” Barty said, after staring at Winky for a few long moments. “Winky… go and get yourself a drink. I know you don’t want to see my face right now.”

Winky hiccuped and apparated away with a loud pop.

Harry became suddenly cognisant of the fact that Barty had let down his guard, that right this moment, he could take out his wand, cast the imperius curse, and force the man to take him back home, and then he could cast the memory charm—actually that would probably be a terrible idea—he could ask Silviu to cast the memory charm instead.

But they were on the same side, he remembered, even if Barty had semi-accidentally kidnapped him. The man would eventually get back to the Dark Lord, Harry’s help or not.

Harry’s stomach growled loudly, reminding him that he had skipped lunch. Barty smirked at him. There was something strangely childish about him—he had to be in his thirties, definitely old, but his face was boyish and expressive and reminded Harry of Shy,  in the sense that he too seemed to p ut on seriousness like an ill-fitting mask.

“Hungry? Me too,” said Barty. “Let’s see if I can’t whip something up.”

He gestured for Harry to follow him and led him to an adjacent room with a gleaming wooden dining table and the same sorts of chairs as the one that Harry had been tied up in. Towards the back there were some cupboards, which Barty opened with a flick of his wand and summoned things out of—tins, mostly, in various shapes and sizes, and two plates and sets of cutlery.

Harry watched in awe as Barty levitated dried pasta out of a tin, twirled his wand just so, and cooked it before his eyes, steam rising gently off the surface. He portioned it onto the two plates, and then waved his wand in a tight circle. A creamy sauce spouted from it and coated the pasta.

“Voila,” he said, and shoved one of the plates towards Harry before pulling up two chairs.

“Did you conjure the sauce?” Harry demanded. “How’s that possible? Doesn’t that violate,” he paused, trying to put his vague understanding to words, “the law that magic can’t create food?”

Barty grinned at him. “Principal exceptions to Gamp’s Law,” he said. “Ravenclaw after my own heart?”

Harry nodded.

“Some people say there are three or five exceptions, but really the only exception to Gamp’s law is magic itself. You can’t transfigure anything non-magical into magic itself and you can’t transfigure magic into something non-magical. That’s why conjured or transfigured food will never nourish you—it’s not real, in that way. But that doesn’t mean you can’t eat it for taste.” And finishing this explanation, Barty sat down, picked up his fork primly, and took a bite of his pasta and conjured sauce. He made a face. “I forgot the salt again.”

Barty sprinkled salt over the pasta with another wave of his wand and Harry dug in curiously. Even with salt, the pasta was bland—he reckoned it could use a good dash of pepper and maybe some basil. Barty was obviously proficient with cooking spells and not so much with cooking.

Barty seemed to come to the same conclusion, because he sighed and muttered, “Winky makes cooking feasts look so easy. Must be her own brand of magic.”

“I think you just need to use more spices,” Harry suggested gently.

“I think I need Winky to get over Father,” Barty said. “I don’t understand why she adores him so much. He treated her like furniture.”

“You don’t chose who to love,” Harry said, borrowing Petri’s wisdom.

“But you do,” Barty argued. “Love is intentional, it’s an action. What are you, twelve? Where are you getting these ideas from?”

“Almost twelve,” Harry admitted, and avoided citing his source by eating another forkful of pasta.

“But you know about the Unforgivables and Gamp’s Law,” Barty said, eyebrows raised. “Surely they aren’t teaching that to first years at Hogwarts. Who are your parents, anyway? Should I be worried?”

“My parents are dead,” Harry said.

“Oh. Mine too, I suppose,” Barty said. Harry wondered what had happened to his mum, but did not ask. “Your guardians then, who are they? You aren’t living alone?”

“I live with my uncle,” Harry told him.

“Anybody I would know?” Barty asked. Harry gave him an odd look.

“Probably not,” he said, “but I wouldn’t know who you know. I don’t even know your surname.”

“Crouch,” said Barty, looking a little disappointed when Harry failed to react. The name only sounded vaguely familiar. “I suppose you haven’t heard of my father, then? He’s not as famous these days. Lost a lot of face after throwing me in Azkaban.” His knuckles turned white as grip on his fork tightened.

“He… threw you in Azkaban?” Harry repeated, not fully understanding how that was possible.

“He was the head of the DMLE back then. The aurors. He sentenced me to life. Small mercies it wasn’t the kiss,” Barty said.

Now Harry was even more confused. “But… you’re here now. They let you go?”

Barty let out a sardonic snort. “My mother’s last wish. She was dying. My father broke me out  and  sent her to die in my place. So much for rule of law. Then he put me under the imperius curse, like I told you.”

“Were you innocent?” Harry asked, aghast at this tragic story.

Barty snorted again. “Nobody is innocent. There are only powerful people and weak people. I was weak, stupid. It turns out, knowing more spells than other people doesn’t mean you can actually duel. And knowing how to duel doesn’t matter when you’re outnumbered ten to one.”

Harry wasn’t sure what he was talking about. There was a faraway look in Barty’s eye and a  momentary resentful gleam  that faded as suddenly as it had appeared.

“So what about you?” he asked.

“Sorry?” said Harry

“What’s your story? Tell me about yourself,” Barty clarified. “You said you live with your uncle. What does he do?”

“He’s an enchanter,” Harry said.

“What kind?” asked Barty.

Not entirely certain how to answer the question, Harry said, “Glass and crystal and such.” This appeared to be the right sort of answer, because Barty nodded enthusiastically.

“Glass, that’s impressive,” he said. “I remember spending Merlin knows how long practising how to charm mirrors for the Charms NEWT, and then it didn’t even come up at all. It was all plants and metals.”

“Is it harder to charm glass?” Harry asked. “I’ve never heard that.” Petri had certainly never mentioned it, though he supposed it was the man’s speciality, so perhaps to him there was no difference, or it was easier.

“It’s harder to get spells to stick to some materials than others. They tend to bounce off stone and glass. I expect you wouldn’t notice it for first year charms, though,” Barty explained.

“Why is that?” Harry asked. Barty wasn’t put off by his questioning—on the contrary, a manic glint entered his eye and he leaned forward.

“So you know that there’s magic everywhere, right? But it doesn’t interact with non-magical things at all. It only starts doing that when it gets bunched up, like when a wizard gathers it to cast a spell,” Barty began. Harry nodded. He could have guessed as much. “Well, how much magic you need to build up for it to start interacting depends on how big the atoms of the material are. You know about atoms?”

“They’re like tiny building blocks for everything,” Harry said, unable to produce a better formulation from his vaguely remembered science lessons in primary. Barty looked surprised, but he nodded.

“Right, so each material is made of a different sort of atom, and they’re different sizes. The bigger they are, the less magic it takes to touch them, and that means spells can’t go into them. That’s why you can’t transfigure gold and silver, because they’re so big—people call that one of the exceptions to Gamp’s Law, but in my opinion it’s just again that you can’t transfigure non-magic to magic. Goblins _can_ transfigure gold and silver, and I reckon it’s because they use far less magic to do it. Of course anything that completely blocks magic is also easy to grasp with magic, so it’s no trouble to charm metal. It’s the mid-size stuff that’s tricky.”

“How do you know all that?” Harry asked, wide-eyed. Did Hogwarts teach all this theory? He certainly had not seen even a hint of it in his first year.

Barty broke out into a radiant smile  and leaned forward, propping his chin up with his arm . “My master, the Dark Lord—he’s taught me so much about magic, infinitely more than the stodgy fossils at Hogwarts ever could have. People don’t realise how brilliant and revolutionary he is, how much further he’s gone than any wizard before him in testing and challenging the boundaries of what we know. And he is so generous with his knowledge, too—amazingly didactic.  P eople don’t understand, even some of my old… colleagues, they don’t understand him the way I do, they think he’s just interested in stamping out mudbloods. Never mind mudbloods, who cares about  _mudbloods_ when you could be learning to harness the fundamental forces of existence?”

Harry nodded slowly, speechless at the enthusiasm and sheer reverence that laced Barty’s every word. The fact that the Dark Lord called his Death Eaters his friends while they all called him their master had seemed very strange to him, but out of Barty’s mouth it suddenly made sense, as a title of genuine respect.

Barty’s expression softened, and he laid his arm on the table, tracing his skull-and-snake scar with his gaze. “I miss him so badly. When I heard he was gone, I gave up the will to live. Dementors didn’t help, I suppose. I probably would have really died in Azkaban if it hadn’t been for Mother. Even after that, I didn’t care, I didn’t want to think or feel ever again. I let Father keep me prisoner. The imperius curse… it feels very nice, you know?”

“I know,” Harry said, shuddering. Barty gave him a piercing look. 

“Someone’s cast it on you before?” he asked.

“Only for practice, for resisting it,” Harry said as casually as he could, shrugging. Barty relaxed deliberately and nodded.

“That’s good. That’s a useful ability. I wish I could have done it, thrown it off and gone to look for my master myself, to help him.” He looked away regretfully, and then back at his mark, reaching out his right hand and framing it between his thumb and forefinger.

“Do you want me to go ask Sil—the vampires, now, if they’ve heard back from Malfoy yet?” Harry asked. “Actually, hold on, can’t you send a letter or something to Malfoy? Wouldn’t that be easier?”

Barty snorted and clenched his fist. “Malfoy is the world’s most untrustworthy bastard,” he said. “I’d sooner off myself than ask him for help. The same goes for most of my  colleagues . Scum and bottom-feeders, false friends, denying our lord the moment things started to look difficult. Only we few who went to Azkaban rather than renounce him are truly loyal. He’ll free them, soon enough, and they’ll be rewarded.”

Harry watched him uncertainly for a few moments. Barty seemed to have lost himself in staring at his arm again. Then he shook his head and stood up, waving his wand to clean the dishes and clear them away.

“Right. Let’s go then. We’ll have to go outside to apparate. I should get dressed.” Barty pointed his wand at himself, transfiguring his nightgown into more appropriate dark blue robes and his slippers into loafers. Harry wondered why anybody ever bought clothes, before he remembered that if somebody asked him to transfigure robes, he wouldn’t even know where to start. At Hogwarts, they had never transfigured anything that wouldn’t fit in the palm of his hand.

Barty led him back through the parlour, which was now forbiddingly dark without the benefit of the stars, and through an arch on the opposite end that opened into a short vestibule. They exited the house through the frosted glass front door, stopping on the top step of the stoop to stay under cover. It had started to rain in earnest, rendering it impossible to make out anything more than a few feet into the gloom.

“Hold onto my arm,” Barty said, and Harry reached out to grasp it. As he did so, however, his forehead split open with pain and he immediately let go to slap his hand to his scar. Barty had leapt back with a yell and was staring at his arm in bewilderment and horror.

The watery, distorted silhouette of the garden and the pitter-patter of rain cut off suddenly into a stiller, more complete darkness. Harry blinked rapidly, puzzled, then enraged, then curious, and finally indifferent again about the gentle tugging, the strange location blossoming in his mind’s eye. He lay there, eyes darting momentarily to the window to confirm that it was pitch dark, certainly still deep in the night. Who dared summon him at such an odd hour, or indeed at all? He had given them no leave to do anything of the sort. Curiosity came back, insistent, along with a flash of excitement at the thought of somebody screaming under his wand. Who would it be?

He rolled over and in one sinuous movement righted himself and landed on his feet. The floor was frigid against his skin, but he warmed it pleasantly with his next step, rolling his shoulders and raising a hand. His robes wrapped themselves around him and his wand settled between his fingers, already lit with a soft blue glow. There he paused, halfway across the room, wondering if he should perhaps  return to  his meditation after all instead of indulging in this foolishness. He considered the destination that had been given to him again—the front porch of a modest house, outfitted with narrow white columns and decorated with hanging planters full of summer flowers.

It was Barty’s house, Harry realised. He narrowed his eyes in confusion. Barty’s… house…? How had he known that? He had no cause to believe it. In fact, it made absolutely no sense, but he knew it nonetheless  as if it were fact . Curiosity overcame his reservations.

Never one to deny himself for long, he closed his eyes, destination firmly in mind, and disapparated.

Harry came back to himself with a strangled gasp, finding himself on the ground. Barty was leaning over him, wand out, eyes darting back and forth in fear and confusion.

“He’s coming,” Harry whispered, wheezing as he tried to sit up. He coughed. His throat was on fire—he must have choked on his own spit.

“ _Anapneo_ ,” Barty cast, and Harry gasped as he felt a firm punch to his chest. His airway was suddenly clear, though, and he managed to stumble to his feet just in time to see the Dark Lord apparate soundlessly right in front of them. He was tall and thin, so pale his skin was almost translucent, and completely bald.

Green eyes met red and Harry pitched forward, his scar erupting in agony again, almost blinding him. Pressing his hands to it did nothing to soothe the pain.  The skin beneath his fingertips was damp and clammy ,  from sweat or blood he couldn’t tell.

“Harry,” a high, raspy voice whispered, cutting through the roaring of his blood in his ears. A cold hand brushed his fingers aside gently, and the pain somehow intensified, as if a battering ram were being smashed against the inside of his skull. He keened through his gritted teeth, trying not to scream. “Look at me.”

Though he wanted to clench his eyes shut and never open them again, Harry forced his eyelids to part and stared into the Dark Lord’s gleaming red eyes, their slit pupils just inches from his own. Something cool and slippery seemed to sink into his head with a splash, and suddenly the pain was gone. Only the dull ache of too much air passing through his heaving chest remained. He sucked in a last deep breath and held it there.

“Curious,” said the Dark Lord. He looked down, and Harry’s eyes flickered to the side to see Barty prostrated on the steps, heedless of the rain pelting his visibly shuddering body. “Also curious. A second dead Death Eater, come back to life in as many days. Get up, Barty. Won’t you invite your lord inside?”

Barty sprang to his feet in a blur. The door slammed open without him touching it and he rushed into the house, dripping on the linoleum. He bowed low. “Master, please come in. I’m so grateful that you’re here, thank you Master, thank you…”

The Dark Lord held up a hand as he entered and Barty stopped speaking instantly, like a paused record. Harry hurried after him, heart pounding with some unknown cocktail of social anxiety and fear for his life.

Barty ushered the Dark Lord to the armchair in the parlour and then knelt in front of him. He leaned down momentarily to kiss the hem of his robe, before sitting back with his hands clasped and head bowed.

Harry sat on the ground some distance away but not out of reach, half-hiding behind the tea table. The Dark Lord paid him no mind and reached out to tilt Barty’s chin up. They stared at each other in silence for about a minute—legilimency, Harry supposed. Barty looked increasingly tense, as if he were in pain, and when the Dark Lord broke eye contact he slumped slightly in relief, gasping.

“Barty, my dear friend, my faithful servant,” the Dark Lord said almost fondly, taking Barty’s face gently in both hands, “how you have suffered for me all these years. You are not like the others. Your faith in me has never wavered. I recognise it. It pleases me. What can Lord Voldemort grant you, so that you will not have suffered in vain?”

“Master…” Barty’s breath hitched, and he paused, as if overcome. Tears glistened at the corner of his eyes, though they did not fall. “It was never in vain. All I ask for is to serve you again, to stand at your side and bask in your glory. I need nothing else.”

“Naturally,” said the Dark Lord, releasing his face to clap Barty firmly on the shoulder, like a proud father. “You were always useful to me, and I know you will prove yourself most useful again. Know that you have my favour.”

The Dark Lord gave him a light push, and Barty got to his feet with a lax grin on his face and retreated to sit on the opposite couch. Now the Dark Lord turned to Harry and beckoned for him to approach. Harry stood up too quickly, smashing his knee into the tea table. Holding back a wince, he hobbled over, sure that his face was flashing colours as fear and embarrassment warred with each other.

Should he kneel, as Barty had done? He wasn’t exactly one of the Dark Lord’s followers, but when he was finally standing there, just a little above eye level, it felt too awkward and he lowered himself onto the rug, ignoring the smarting in his bruised knee.

“Barty, did you know that your guest is none other than Harry Potter?” the Dark Lord asked conversationally, his eyes crinkling in amusement.

“Yes, Master, he did say his name was Harry,” said Barty, sounding uncertain. The Dark Lord smiled thinly, his eyes darting down to Harry.

“Fascinating. I noticed something of this at Hogwarts too, that nobody seemed capable of truly recognising you except for me. Why is that, I wonder?” he murmured.

“There’s a fidelius charm on my name. Sir,” Harry managed haltingly, trying to think of it like he was speaking to a professor. Nothing to be afraid of.

The Dark Lord made a sort of lilting sound in the back of his throat. “Dumbledore’s handiwork?”

“No, sir, my uncle’s,” Harry said.

“The false uncle, yes. I remember,” said the Dark Lord. “I confess, I have never heard of the fidelius charm being used to hide an identity. Such a complex thing to be made secret. But no. Harry Potter, the Boy-Who-Lived, is not your identity, is it? As you said, it is merely your name. Yes… you told me, before, that you think of yourself as ‘Just Harry.’”

Harry nodded.

“Very well then, Harry. I know that we parted in less-than-ideal circumstances last time, with no proper farewell. I want you to know that I have not forgotten your help in restoring me to my body, and that I consider us… even,” the Dark Lord said. “Perhaps you even deserve a reward for your admirable initiative. Ah, yes, first, I owe you your book.”

He raised a pale hand and a familiar book shimmered into existence. Harry received  _Secrets of the Hieroglyphical Figures_ numbly  and clutched it to his chest , too blindsided to say anything.

“It was instrumental in my restoration,” the Dark Lord told him.

“That’s… good. Thanks for giving it back,” Harry said, a pit forming in his stomach at the confirmation that it must have helped the Dark Lord figure out whatever trick there was to the philosopher’s stone, as Dumbledore had hoped he would not.

“Certainly. Is there anything else you would like? You have Lord Voldemort’s attention. Take a minute to think.”

This must be what dealing with the devil felt like, Harry thought. His first instinct was simply to refuse anything else beyond perhaps some help getting back home. Actually, no. Harry remembered that he could call Rosenkol to help him with that, if need be. So he didn’t need anything.

But he had Lord Voldemort’s positive attention, something he might never have again. The Dark Lord had already said that they were even. It couldn’t hurt to get confirmation, could it?

Harry licked his dry lips, and then said, “I know you said that we’re even. Does that mean you won’t try to kill me again? That’s all I want.”

“As long as you do nothing to oppose me,” the Dark Lord agreed.

“I won’t,” Harry said quickly.

“Consider it done,” the Dark Lord said, with almost suspicious alacrity. He continued, “I am curious, however. Did Dumbledore tell you anything interesting after I left?”

This question was extremely vague, and yet if Petri’s hypothesis was right, Harry could guess exactly what the Dark Lord was asking after. There was no knowing, however, if that was really the case, so he said, “He refused to tell me when I asked him why you tried to kill me as a baby.” 

He remembered that the Dark Lord had been cagey about the subject before, but Harry did not know how else to answer,  so he met red eyes with as much challenge as he could muster.

“Unfortunate,” said the Dark Lord, betraying no emotion. “Tell me. Why do _you_ think I tried to kill you?”

Harry was thrown by this question. What was he supposed to say? “I don’t know.”

“Humour me,” the Dark Lord said, his voice suddenly clear and smooth, like a river, and ever more threatening for it. Harry realised after a beat that he had spoken in Parseltongue.

He couldn’t lie, Harry reminded himself, because he was pretty sure the Dark Lord was a legilimens, and breaking eye contact would be as good as admitting dishonesty. That was a known danger. Telling the truth brought on an unknown one. He steeled himself and, thinking of Shy’s runespoor, he said, “I tried divination.” He heard a sharp intake of breath behind him, perhaps at the sound of Parseltongue. “Everything I tried said that my fate was to die at your hand. So I looked for the reason, but there wasn’t one, except that it was fated. So I thought, you and Dumbledore must have done divination and seen the same thing, or there was a prophecy.”

The Dark Lord looked genuinely surprised for a moment. “I see that you have been up to plenty of extracurricular studying, as always. Your guess is correct. There was a prophecy. Would you like to know what it said?”

Harry stared for a moment in disbelief. “What’s the price?” he finally asked. The Dark Lord smiled.

“You will have to retrieve the recording yourself, from the Department of Mysteries in the Ministry,” he said.

“I can just go there and ask to see it?” Harry asked, confused.

“I am afraid not. You will need to break in. I will, of course, provide assistance,” said the Dark Lord. Harry realised suddenly that this meant that the Dark Lord, too, did not know what exactly the prophecy said, only that it existed and that it implied that he and Harry would duel to the death. From the shift in the Dark Lord’s expression, it was clear that he knew what Harry had deduced. Harry thought quickly.

“Am I allowed to say no? If I find out what the prophecy said, and it’s bad, then we could both be worse off than now. Right now, we’ve agreed not to fight already. Isn’t it better if we don’t know?”

The Dark Lord looked pensive. But then he nodded once. “It is your choice not to know. But I shall not cease my own efforts in obtaining the prophecy. And if you change your mind in the future, I shall not aid you.”

That seemed fair, Harry thought, but it meant he would inevitably be the only one left ignorant. And that was almost certainly a poor position to be in. If that was the case, “Never mind, fine, I’ll help—we can get the prophecy together,” he said.

The Dark Lord smiled coldly. “Very good,” he said, switching to his raspy English. “One month from now, on the twenty-ninth of July, at sunset, you will wait before the gateway to Diagon Alley, alone. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Harry said, not entirely certain what he had just agreed to, or whether he had really had a choice after all.

The Dark Lord nodded and then stood up abruptly, Barty mirroring him almost immediately. Harry tried to stand, but his legs felt like jelly, and he had to push himself up against the tea table.

“Await my call, Barty,” the Dark Lord said. “Do not summon me again.”

“Yes, Master, of course I won’t, not without your leave. Good night, Master,” Barty said breathlessly.

The Dark Lord disapparated, and it was as if the air itself gave a sigh of relief and lightened. Harry certainly felt as if some heavy drape had been lifted from his shoulders. A mild headache that he had not even noticed became clear in its absence. He stood up a little straighter.

Barty turned to him almost immediately, looking utterly bemused. “You’re a parselmouth, like my master. And you summoned him with my mark! And—is it true, you helped to restore him?”

“Yeah, I suppose,” Harry said. His fear had been all used up for the Dark Lord, but his awkwardness still remained in generous measure. Come to think of it, however, the Dark Lord had not mentioned anything about his using Barty’s mark. From the way Barty had reacted, it was clearly abnormal and unexpected.

“Are you… his son?” Barty asked. Harry choked on his involuntary snort.

“No, no!” he hacked out between coughs. Barty looked relieved.

“But then, how could you be a parselmouth? It’s a Slytherin family trait,” he muttered.

“I don’t know,” Harry said honestly. “I’m pretty sure I’m not related to him.”

Barty didn’t look like he quite believed him. “All right, Mr Harry with the secret name. I shan’t pry. I suppose I owe you a thank you. I really didn’t think he would answer a summons. And he didn’t even punish me. I suppose I’m a fool and a coward,” Barty looked down at his mark again. It had turned charcoal black.

Harry wanted to protest, to tell him that he was right, that the Dark Lord wouldn’t have come. That moment when he had recognised the house, Harry was sure that that had been  _him_ and not the Dark Lord. But of course, he couldn’t say anything. He’d missed his opportunity to reveal his connection. Now it was by necessity another secret.

“It was really unexpected,” Harry said lamely. “I suppose you got what you were looking for though. I should probably be going now.”

“You can use the floo,” Barty said, gesturing to the wide fireplace with his wand. A spark flew out and the logs within ignited, crackling merrily. “Powder’s in the jar up top.”

Harry grimaced. He had forgotten about floo, but he supposed Barty didn’t want another incident happening as a result of attempted side-along apparition. Clutching his book to his chest, he took a handful of powder and tossed it in the fire. He took a deep breath, stepped in, and said, “Sixty-six Knockturn Alley!”

Dizzy and sooty, he emerged in the darkness of the owl shed, immediately struck by the dank smell of droppings and old hay. Wrinkling his nose, he hurried outside, only to be nearly barrelled over by an elf-shaped projectile.

“Wizardling is safe! Why didn’t he call for Rosenkol?” Rosenkol demanded, teary black eyes glistening in the dim starlight.

The coppery scent of blood struck him at once, stark and discordant against the damp grass and petrichor. “You’re bleeding?” Harry asked. Rosenkol showed him his bandaged arms, and Harry followed the stained linen down to the elf’s torso, where it disappeared beneath the pinned funeral shroud. He looked like a mummy.

“Rosenkol could not find Wizardling anywhere! He could not keep him safe, so he had to punish himself,” the elf explained, somehow managing to look reproachful about his self-inflicted torture. Harry was unimpressed.

“Sorry,” he said, anyway. “I got knocked out for a while, but then I convinced, er, Winky’s master to let me leave.” He felt a little muddled, like he’d stayed up all night after staying up all day, which of course had not been the case. Perhaps this was the crash after the constant nerve-wracking tension of the Dark Lord’s presence.

Rosenkol teared up again. “Rosenkol is sorry he could not find Wizardling, Winky was hiding well. He searched all around for who was Winky’s master, but nobody would tell, they laughed at Rosenkol and did not help,” the elf cried. “It is all Rosenkol’s fault, he took you to Winky, he did not stop her.”

“It’s all right,” Harry said, patting Rosenkol on the back. The elf flinched, and Harry withdrew hurriedly, realising that he was probably aggravating injuries. “Can I heal you?”

“No!” Rosenkol almost screamed, jumping back. “Rosenkol is deserving this pain.”

“Look, no harm done, I’m fine,” Harry said. “I don’t think you could have done anything. I should have called you to let you know I was all right. Sorry.”

Rosenkol nodded, and changed the subject. “Wizardling is coming inside, and staying there,” he said, tugging Harry toward the coffin house. “Rosenkol is telling Master Joachim that he is being found.”

“Wait, what? You told Master—of course you did,” Harry muttered. “Is he here?”

Rosenkol shook his head. “He is still being in Norway,” he said, and ushered Harry down the steps, before popping away.

Harry figured he was going to be in for it when Petri came back, even though none of this had realistically been his fault. Should he tell Petri about the Dark Lord? Barty? Everything he had seen and said tonight seemed impossibly illicit. The Dark Lord hadn’t told him to keep his mouth shut, but at the same time, Harry did not want to try a new flavour of cruciatus curse.

And what was he supposed to do with the book? Rosenkol hadn’t asked him about it—thank Merlin elves were discreet. Reading it was out of the question, as he was sure it would still make almost no sense to him, but at the same time he had now learned the hard way that it contained priceless information for those who could understand it.

He shoved it in his cauldron under his bed. It was a good thing Petri didn’t know legilimency. But Silviu  _did,_ and so Harry resolved to spend as long as he could avoiding the vampire. One month, the Dark Lord had said. Sunset.


	39. Marionette

Avoiding Silviu for a month was far easier than  expected , since the first thing Petri did upon returning to England was ban Harry from leaving the house.

“I am gone for one day and somehow there is already a disaster,” the man had lamented, full of incredulity.

Knowing that he would have to sneak out on the twenty-ninth, Harry did his best to be on his model behaviour until then. He practised the imperius curse on Ulrich until Petri could no longer spur the inferius to attack. He animated rabbits and bats, and even learned to ‘train’ them to do tasks using the onerous method of changing their fate, which was more permanent than the imperius. Petri had been so impressed by his progress that he had even unearthed a dead muggle for him to work on, not that Harry was anywhere near able to make a true inferius on his own yet.

The Dark Lord had also clearly been busy. While Harry had experienced no more visions, an unprecedented mass Azkaban breakout had been reported in the  _Daily Prophet_ just a week after the Dark Lord’s restoration. According to Minister Fudge, nobody knew how the prisoners had escaped, but security at the prison had been increased (real useful  _after_ the fact) and the aurors were on high-alert. There was no mention of ‘He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named’ being involved, not even a whiff of speculation.

Harry had spent the last few days of the month working out a plan for getting out from underneath Petri’s nose. They usually woke around seven, at least a good hour or two before sunset. The twenty-ninth was a Wednesday, so it was likely that Petri would go to the shop.

It would be easy enough to get out of Petri’s sight and then leave with the invisibility cloak, but he needed a way out the door without arousing Rosenkol’s suspicion. Harry had tried to surreptitiously determine how the elf could pop up at the most unexpected times, as if he had been standing there all along, and had concluded that it was exactly what it looked like. The elf hid in plain sight—if he did not want to be noticed, he could sink below the awareness of wizards and not come back up until he spoke.

On the appointed day, Harry woke at six in the evening, full of nervous energy. Petri was still sound asleep, but it wasn’t as if sneaking out early was an option. On the contrary, he needed to leave as close to sunset as possible so that by the time he was missed, it would be too late.

Under the guise of doing his Astronomy homework, Harry had calculated sunset times for the entire summer. Sunset today was going to be just before nine, and it took about fifteen minutes to walk to the Diagon Alley gateway, so he had determined that it would be best to set off at half past eight. To pass the time, he tried consulting his tarot cards again, focusing on the immediate past and future.

Death, six of wands, and the Dementor. If he continued as he was, he would lose something dear to him. This prognosis did not inspire confidence. Shuffling his deck, he laid out more cards underneath his future.

Three of stars, conflict, of a mental or metaphorical nature. A decision? Six of stars. Merlin, was he going to lose his mental stability? No; that couldn’t be right. It had something to do with a decision, so he was going to lose some of his conviction about something. He sighed a breath he had not realised he was holding.

Frustrated by the increasingly vague results, Harry gathered up the cards and shoved them back into the deck. He busied himself making tea and toast and tried to scramble eggs without having them resemble rubbery blocks. As he hoped, this activity induced Rosenkol to show himself in order to help.

“Wizardling should be sleeping still,” Rosenkol criticised with his usual blandness. Harry shrugged.

“Couldn’t sleep,” Harry said, which was true. He felt sick with trepidation, which was silly, since he had committed himself anyway and had a plan. “What is Rosenkol planning on doing tonight?” he asked. Before the elf could give him a suspicious look, he added, “There’s a potion I wanted to brew, but it needs fresh fluxweed picked at the new moon. That’s tonight, so I was wondering if you had time to go gather some for me.”

It had taken hours of searching to come up with a task that was plausible and also sufficiently arduous that even Rosenkol would not be able to finish it with a snap of his fingers. Since Harry had realised  from his astronomy calculations that the twenty-ninth was a new moon, and knew from Herbology that fluxweed had different properties depending on when it was picked, he had scoured his potions text for something that used it. Fortunately, the school text contained all OWL-level and below potions, and he managed to find a third year potion called obfuscation ointment that was supposed to hide skin defects.

“What is fluxweed be looking like and where is it growing?” Rosenkol asked.

Harry plated his eggs and toast and showed Rosenkol the entry in his herbology reference. Fluxweed was native to North America, which meant that it would probably be difficult to find—that, or Rosenkol would have to go all the way across the ocean, something which Harry was not sure was actually feasible.

Rosenkol made no comment about the task being unreasonable and simply nodded. “Rosenkol will gather it.”

“You have to do it a bit after it gets dark, that would be the best,” Harry said.

Harry ate his breakfast without tasting it, which was perhaps fortunate as he had forgotten salt and pepper. Afterwards, he pretended to study potions and even actually wrote a few things for his summer homework. Only when Petri finally rose and departed to the shop and Rosenkol disapparated away with a clear pop did Harry finally relax.

Then he sprang into action. He put on his outdoor cloak and shoes before grabbing his invisibility cloak out of his cauldron and throwing it over his shoulders. Paranoid, he checked in the bathroom mirror that he really was invisible  before setting out.

It was raining, as usual, and he  proudly cast his recently-acquired impervius charm on himself to repel  the  water.

Despite himself, he was early. It was only quarter past eight when he left the graveyard. His heart was pounding, and he took a few moments to breathe deeply, moving down Knockturn Alley at a leisurely pace. He was worried the rain would delineate his body, but visibility was so poor anyhow that he probably could have gone without the invisibility cloak entirely.

At the Diagon Alley gateway, it suddenly occurred to him that the Dark Lord had not specified which side of the brick wall he was supposed to wait on. Since he figured the area behind the Leaky Cauldron with its rubbish bins was more secluded, he decided to take shelter there and reap the added benefit of not being wet, though he was plagued by the worry that he might miss whatever cue he was supposed to be waiting for if he were on the wrong side.

At five minutes until sundown by his calculations, though with the heavy cloud cover it was already very dark, he stripped off his invisibility cloak, dried it with the hot-air charm, and shoved it into his pocket. He waited, heart thudding in his throat, his wand out and lit.

“Put out your wand, kid,” somebody whispered from right behind him, and Harry whirled around to see a thin man with scraggly red hair and a smarmy face.

“ _Nox,_ ” Harry said, and then a little snidely, “How do you do?” He recognised this man as the Death Eater whom the Dark Lord had tortured on the eve of the first meeting, so he was sure he had the right person.

“Come on,” said the man, not bothering to introduce himself properly. He put his hand on Harry’s shoulder and steered him into the Leaky Cauldron. They passed through without acknowledging the barkeep, entering the muggle world. The man led Harry past a muggle bookshop, ducked under an awning, and held out his arm.

“We’re apparating,” he said. Harry took the proffered limb, careful not to get near where the Dark Lord’s mark would be. The wizard turned on his heel and they were pulled through a constricting tube. Harry stumbled as they landed, feeling like his organs had been rearranged.

They had appeared on a dirt path somewhere, still outside but thankfully dry. It was bright, though the sun had set—millions of stars twinkled above with a fidelity that Harry had only seen  before atop the Hogwarts astronomy tower. He gazed up the path, finding nothing but an empty field. Before his mind could catch up with his thudding heart and suddenly dry mouth, his escort grunted and tugged him along at a brisk walk.

Harry could not hold back a gasp as the air suddenly rippled and warped. The ground beneath his feet morphed seamlessly into neat white stone, which cut a line through an endless, elaborate topiary garden and led up to a forbiddingly grand mansion whose steep gables seemed to cast shadows against the very sky.

Just as Harry was gearing up for the long trek to reach the front door, the Death Eater grabbed his hand again and apparated once more. Unprepared, Harry stumbled as they landed and had to clutch the man’s arm with both hands to keep upright.

This time they seemed to have appeared inside the house, in a lavish drawing room about the size of the whole Ravenclaw common room. It was full of elaborate rugs, gilded tapestries, and stiff-looking furniture. The Dark Lord was standing at the end of a long settee, flanked by Lucius Malfoy and a gaunt, pockmarked man.

“Avery, Harry, right on time,” the Dark Lord greeted with a thin smile. Harry’s scar immediately began to hurt, though not so terribly as the last time the Dark Lord came into proximity.

“My Lord,” said Avery, bowing with a slight tremble as he tore his arm out of Harry’s grip. Harry bowed awkwardly too, feeling exposed. The other two presumed Death Eaters were both staring at him with too much curiosity.

“Avery, you may go. Lucius, Rookwood, this is Harry, our guest today, whom you will be escorting. We will need to make some preparations first, however. _Imperio!_ ”

Harry was blindsided by the imperius curse, which the Dark Lord had somehow cast in the very instant that his wand had materialised in his hand. He felt boneless and utterly relaxed, but the characteristic haze only threatened to overtake his mind for an instant before receding, leaving him aware. Practice really had helped. He was familiar with exactly how much he could submit to conserve mental energy without losing the ability to disobey.

“Come here, Harry,” the Dark Lord commanded, and Harry stepped forward voluntarily.

“Just so you know, sir,” he said, emboldened by the imperius-induced sense of safety, “in case it’s a problem—I can resist the imperius curse.”

“Ah, ‘just Harry,’ always full of surprises,” the Dark Lord murmured. “It is no matter. I simply need an expedient way to command you from a distance.”

Also an expedient way to keep him calm, Harry thought. Without the pleasant influence of the curse, he imagined he would be feeling rather indignant at the moment at being assaulted by an Unforgivable without so much as a by-your-leave.

“Look into my eyes, and let me in again, just like… before,” the Dark Lord said. Harry met the red-eyed gaze and his head was suddenly on fire, like something long and wriggling was trying to burrow into his eye-sockets. He felt it coiling around his body, constricting him.

_Come in, come in, let it be over, let me out_ , he thought, taking gasping breaths. The possession took hold, and the pain disappeared underneath the soothing embrace of the imperius.

“The potion now, Rookwood,” said the Dark Lord, from his own body. Rookwood produced a vial of some utterly foul-smelling green sludge. He took a sharp breath, lifted it to his lips, and tipped it back, dropping the vial as soon he had drunk it all. The effect was immediate—his skin began to bubble, warping and distorting his features, and his bones creaked and cracked as he seemed to shrink. His hair greyed and his skin darkened and wrinkled. When it was done, he was somebody else entirely, an elderly wizard with a lazy eye.

The Dark Lord nodded once in apparent approval.

“Lucius, go and clear the way,” he said. Malfoy bowed, then walked up to the grand fireplace at the other end of the room and tapped his cane against a statue of a peacock, which opened its tail and expelled a puff of floo powder. Harry thought the mechanism seemed familiar.

“Ministry of Magic,” Malfoy said clearly, and disappeared in a whoosh of green flame.

That was right, they had the same thing on the floos at the Ministry.

Harry saw an image in his mind’s eye, black metal pickets, stone stairs down—a public toilet? He turned on his heel and apparated.

Apparating on one’s own, he discovered, was significantly preferable to side-along apparition. There was still the constriction, the lack of air, but he was prepared and felt like he had squirmed his own way through the tube rather than been shoved. He emerged in a grimy alley at the edge of a crowded street, thankfully still in one piece. So much for being too young to apparate.

Rookwood appeared at his side a moment later and reached into his pocket, producing a golden coin that was shinier and smaller than a galleon. He handed it to Harry.

“Here, you’ll need this to get in,” he said, his voice high and creaky. They entered the crowd obliquely, pressing through a surge of bodies and umbrellas until they stood at the entry to the gentlemen’s toilets. Rookwood descended and Harry followed, perplexed but still only partly in control of his body.

Downstairs it still looked like a regular public toilet. Rookwood went up to one of the stalls and inserted a token into a tiny slot on the side. The door opened, and he stepped inside and shut it after him. Harry entered the next stall. He heard a flushing sound from his left, then nothing.

Lord Voldemort seemed to know what to do, because Harry found himself stepping up into the toilet. Though he appeared to be standing  ankle-deep in a bowl of water, his feet were not at all wet.

He took out his wand and tapped himself sharply over the head. Something cold and slimy seemed to dribble down the back of his neck, and he squirmed. When he glanced down at himself again, he saw nothing at all—he was invisible!

Harry felt himself reaching out, trying to grasp the chain for the flush. It took a few tries to do it without being able to see his own hand, but then he pulled, and the water rose up and swirled him round and round, spitting him out of… a fireplace. Why hadn’t they just taken the floo in the first place?

Disorientated, he took a moment to shake himself off before he looked around. He was in the atrium of the Ministry of Magic, only it was dark and deserted, illuminated only by glowing golden runes that writhed fluidly overhead. The only sound was that of rushing water. Harry glanced to the fountain to see Rookwood standing off to the side, staring nervously at the unlit grates.

“I’m here,” he called to the man. Rookwood jumped, before turning in his approximate direction and gesturing.

“This way,” he said, unnecessarily; Harry’s body was already walking towards the golden vestibule where the knew the lift to the other levels was located. Though he was invisible, his footsteps echoed loudly against the polished floor, marking his presence.

There was a wizard sitting at the security desk, but he only stared blankly at Rookwood as they passed. Under the imperius curse, or confounded, it seemed. Was this what the Dark Lord had meant when he had asked Lucius to “clear the way?”

They entered the cage of the lift, and Rookwood punched the button for the ninth floor without even looking. The lift began to descend noisily as soon as the grille clanked shut. It was excruciatingly slow. Harry didn’t remember it being so dreadful of a ride last time, but perhaps the newness of it all and the fact that the lift had stopped at practically every floor had helped. Now he was ever so impatient and bored.

He narrowed his eyes, realising that he couldn’t feel the imperius curse any more, at all. That wasn’t right. He sought out the enticing glow of surrender, of giving up the self, and suddenly it was there again, the force of it driving him to distraction.

When he blinked again, the lift had stopped, and a cool, female voice announced, “Department of Mysteries.”

The grille slammed open, sending a gust of wind down the corridor and rattling the torches. Rookwood stepped out and led the way down the hall, towards a black door that flickered in and out of sight under the unsteady illumination. When they were nearly there, a shadow on the wall shuddered, and then Lucius Malfoy came into view, along with an unfamiliar wizard with a square face and thick blond hair.

“I found one of Dumbledore’s stooges,” Malfoy said, indicating the other wizard, who stood there passively. Harry guessed he had been put under the imperius curse. “Any trouble on your end?” Malfoy asked Rookwood, who shook his head. He glanced around. “Where is…”

“Disillusioned,” said Rookwood, nodding to his right, though Harry was really a few paces behind him.

“Lead the way,” Harry said coldly, feeling an uncharacteristic smirk touch his face.

Rookwood paled and hunched slightly more than before, scurrying forward. The black door opened on its own. They stepped through it into a large, circular room full of other, identical doors and lit by blue  torches . Malfoy did not follow them, instead disillusioning himself again. Rookwood shut the door and the whole room clicked and gave an ominous hum. Undaunted, he raised his wand and incanted, “ _Cirumrota cameram temporis_ .”

The walls shuddered.  Then they began to spin around rapidly. Harry felt dizzy  and had to  shut his eyes. When he opened them again, the room had stopped spinning. Rookwoo d pulled open  the door right behind them, but it no longer led out into the dark corridor they had just come from. Instead, brilliant, sparkling light poured out, and when Harry’s eyes adjusted to the glowing ambiance he was greeted by the sight of hundreds of gleaming clock faces in all sizes, from minuscule watches to grandfather clocks to a gigantic round slab that took up its own wall and looked like it belonged on a bell tower. They ticked in perfect synchrony, filling the space with their relentless tempo.

At the back of the room was a huge glass bell jar that appeared to house a dazzling tempest. Rookwood led him through the narrow gaps between the timepiece-laden desks and shelves and right past the shining jar, where Harry could now make out a hummingbird which, as it fluttered about, helpless against the raging wind, seemed to shrink and regress until it became enclosed in a tiny, brilliantly vibrant egg.

He would have missed the dark, nondescript door behind it had Rookwood not opened it up and beckoned for him to follow. The  candlelit  room beyond was cavernou s  and, with the door clicking shut behind them, eerily silent. Their syncopated footfalls echoed erratically off hundreds of dusty, evenly spaced shelves. It reminded Harry of a church or a library, only instead of books, each shelf held countless little glass orbs  glowing white with varying intensity.

“It’s more recent. It’ll be towards the end,” Rookwood whispered, gesturing to the right. Harry spotted silver numbers etched onto each shelf. Fifty-four was the nearest one, and they were going in the ascending direction.

The farther they walked, the brighter the orbs seemed to be. Or rather, Harry noticed that some orbs were dark, like broken light bulbs, while others were full of milky luminescence, and there were more of the latter sort on the higher-numbered shelves.

They stopped at row ninety-five and Rookwood peered at some of the tiny, yellowed labels that were stuck to the shelf below each orb.

“Damn,” he muttered under his breath, “No dates, typical.”

“Hello?” came a voice from nearby, and Harry froze, even though he was invisible. Rookwood tensed visibly, wand jumping to his hand, but then he lowered his arm and put it away.

“Hello,” he called back. The sound of footsteps reached their ears, growing louder and louder, and then a young woman came out from behind the next shelf.

“Oh, hello Broderick,” she said. “I didn’t expect you here so late.”

“I could say the same thing. What are you still doing here?” Rookwood asked. The woman flushed.

“Fell asleep doing the recounting. I better finish up…” She glanced morosely down the seemingly endless hall, and then over to a roll of parchment in her hand.

“Why don’t you go on home?” Rookwood suggested. “I can finish the last rows.”

“Oh I couldn’t possibly ask you to waste your valuable time on _this_ ,” The woman laughed, waving her arm dismissively. “This dusty nonsense.”

“It’s important work,” Rookwood said impassively, “I’d be happy to do it.”

After some more polite refusal, countered by Rookwood’s relentless cajoling, the woman caved and handed him the parchment. When her retreating form finally disappeared from view, Rookwood stepped back and began studying the scroll, waving his wand over it.

“What is it?” Harry asked. Rookwood jumped.

“It’s the count roster, with how many active prophecies are left in each row,” he explained. “I think I can maybe get it to show the labels… yes, there.”

“Active prophecies?” Harry asked. “How can they go inactive?” He assumed that was what had happened to the darkened orbs. Could it be that some prophecies did not have to come to pass after all?

“When everybody who’s heard them is dead, or when all the subjects are dead, they go out,” Rookwood muttered, unfurling the bottom of the scroll, which seemed to go on forever.

Harry felt a chill at the implications. If he and the Dark Lord listened to this prophecy, there would be no escaping it, except perhaps by some stupid solution like suicide which was no solution at all. Then again, Dumbledore, who was old but probably not going to keel over any time soon, was the original recipient, so for all intents and purposes the prophecy was already and would remain active.

“Row ninety-seven, I think,” said Rookwood at length. The parchment had pooled at his feet in a generous pile. With a wave of his wand, he left it spinning in the air to roll itself back up. They moved down two more rows, and Rookwood tapped the shelf three times with his wand. “ _Aparecium_ Dark Lord,” he said. There was a small spark just a little ways down the row. He hurried towards it.

Harry saw it instantly as he scanned the shelf, his eyes almost drawn in. One of the labels was glowing a tiny bit from the middle. It read:

SPT to APWBD

Dark Lord

and (?) Harry Potter

_Take it_ . The compulsion was so strong that Harry’s hand had shot out before he was even aware of moving. His invisible fingers closed around the dusty orb on the shelf above, and it vanished from sight. He could feel its grimy surface against his palm, where it pulsated with warmth like a living creature. Was that it? Were they done? He supposed all that was left was to get out of the Ministry.

Had taking the orb set off any alarms?

Rookwood was already walking back towards the entrance to the prophecy hall, and Harry hurried after him, orb firmly in hand. They retraced their steps, encountering no resistance. Malfoy was still standing outside with the imperiused wizard.  H e informed them that he had seen an Unspeakable witch hurry past perhaps ten minutes ago, but that nobody else had come into the corridor.

Malfoy left the other wizard in the corridor, sending him towards the black door to the Department of Mysteries, before they took the lift together and flooed out of the atrium individually.

The Dark Lord was where they had left him, lounging on the settee with his eyes closed and fingers steepled under his chin. His eyes snapped open as they arrived, and Harry stumbled as he felt the possession end, his whole body suddenly resynchronising with his mind in a jarring shift of perception. The disillusionment seemed to have ended as well, as he found that he could now see his nose, the edges of his spectacles, and some stray locks of hair.

“Lucius, you are dismissed,” the Dark Lord said, as if Malfoy were an errant schoolboy. Unfazed, Malfoy bowed and backed out of the room, finding the exit perfectly without looking. Rookwood shifted nervously.

The Dark Lord held out one pale, spidery hand in expectation, and Harry stepped forward and deposited the prophecy orb there.

What now? They had had a deal, and Harry hoped the Dark Lord was not about to renege.

“Rookwood,” said the Dark Lord. “I shall need your help with this.”

“Yes, My Lord, of course,” said Rookwood, approaching the Dark Lord and kneeling. Harry hung back, looking on cautiously.

There was a long silence, and then the Dark Lord said, with clear impatience, “Well? How does one listen to the contents?”

“I… My Lord, I’m sorry, but I do not know,” Rookwood said, and began to tremble.

“You do not know? Did you not used to work for the Department of Mysteries?” the Dark Lord asked, abandoning his seat to circle around behind the kneeling man.

“Yes, My Lord, but…”

“And did you not spend some of your time there studying prophecies?”

“I did, My Lord, but only the inactive ones,” Rookwood blurted hastily. When the Dark Lord did not immediately interrupt him, he continued, “We never—nobody ever listened to the active ones. It was too dangerous. The orbs were made so that we could hear the contents after they went out and not before.”

“ _Crucio_ ,” said the Dark Lord conversationally, his wand suddenly in his hand, and Rookwood screamed, though the sound soon tapered off into a low whine and he held himself stiff as a board, obviously putting all his effort into not thrashing. Harry was impressed. He counted the seconds before the Dark Lord stopped the curse, heart thudding in his chest as it continued on and on. 

Twelve seconds. Harry had never endured it for more than five, and even that was five too many. This was far beyond warning, even beyond punishment, well into the realm of wanton cruelty. He knew, he could  _feel_ the echo of how the Dark Lord enjoyed, indeed, was exhilarated by, the sight of somebody helpless under his wand, suffering for want of his mercy.

Rookwood was shaking and gasping on the floor, his forehead pressed to the carpet as if he hoped to sink into it. The Dark Lord finished his circuit and stopped in front of him, looking thoughtful.

“I do not blame you for your ignorance, Rookwood,” he said gently, with clear relish at the way Rookwood shuddered convulsively at the sound of his own name. “In the future, you will advise me of the limitations of your knowledge earlier. You understand… it would be most unfortunate if some oversight led to a setback at a critical juncture.”

“Yes, yes, Master, I understand,” Rookwood gasped out in a hoarse voice.

“Stand up, Rookwood,” said the Dark Lord, and Rookwood surged to his feet, swaying slightly and still trembling. “You have done well in navigating the Ministry and securing the prophecy for me. I do not discount your efforts.”

“Yes, Master,” Rookwood mumbled, staring at the floor.

“Very well… you may go.”

Rookwood bowed low and hurried out of the room with far less grace than Malfoy had, bumping against the doorframe with a loud crack before he managed to exit, easing the door closed after him. Just before he disappeared out of sight, Harry glimpsed his face bubbling and warping again, returning to its original appearance.

When the door clicked shut, the Dark Lord burst into mirthless laughter, holding up the prophecy orb.

“Funny, is it not?” he said, though he still did not sound amused at all. “The prophecy is literally in my hands, and yet, as out of reach as ever.”

The Dark Lord turned his head. Harry tensed. The sudden end of the imperius curse came like a punch to the gut, and he had to inhale sharply to avoid vomiting. His heart twisted and leapt up into his throat—his whole body throbbed with newly unleashed horror.

“Come here, Harry,” said the Dark Lord. Harry stumbled over, swallowing repeatedly in an attempt to calm his churning stomach. “Kneel.”

He knelt. The carpet was rich and soft.

“No, stand up,” the Dark Lord said almost immediately, and Harry’s head whipped up in outrage even as he stood again. What was this about? He wasn’t some dog to be told to sit, stand, and roll over.

Though reason managed to stay his tongue, with great difficulty, the Dark Lord had obviously read his indignation from his face or even his mind.

“No need to be upset, Harry. Obedience is a virtue that I value, and you are very obedient,” he said. “I wonder who taught you?”

Not who, but what, Harry thought. The pain of the cruciatus curse was too steep a price to be paid for anything, let alone pride and obstinacy.

“No matter. You have done as I asked, and it seems your original wish will be granted. Both of us will remain ignorant of the prophecy,” said the Dark Lord.

Afraid or not, Harry had to ask.

“If you find out how to listen to it, will you tell me?”

“I promised, did I not? Lord Voldemort keeps his promises. If I find out, you will be the first to know. Indeed, I daresay I could not stop you from seeing it through my eyes.”

Harry looked away guiltily, wondering how the Dark Lord had known, and whether he would be punished for his reticence.

“Our connection is unique and very useful,” the Dark Lord said. “There are places where it would be very… inconvenient for me to go. You will serve as my eyes and ears there.”

_Hogwarts_ , Harry thought.

“It is also a liability, however, and you will not breathe a word of its existence to anyone,” the Dark Lord hissed.

Well, it was too late for that. Harry swallowed. “The vampire, the chairman of the company, he can read my mind and he knows,” he said.

“Silviu Vlaicu,” said the Dark Lord, narrowing his eyes. Harry’s scar pulsed with sudden pain. “Look at me.”

Harry met the Dark Lord’s gaze, immediately feeling an intrusion, like something was swimming about in his head. His scar no longer hurt but a dull ache began to build behind his eyes, and strange, disconnected thoughts and images came to him like successive epiphanies about things he already knew.

Silviu, barging into the house after Harry’s first vision. The company meeting. Silviu talking about goblins. Talking about the Dark Lord, in respectful terms, thankfully.

“You will see to it that he forgets,” the Dark Lord said.

“How?” Harry asked.

“Consider it a test,” was the response. “Perhaps it would be beneficial for you to learn occlumency so that you will not be vulnerable to such attacks in the future.”

“Is there a book about it?” Harry asked.

“No. Occlumency is not something that one learns from a book. I will arrange for a teacher… I would not be suitable, as I doubt you will ever be capable of occluding against me. Nor should you try,” the Dark Lord told him.

At this, Harry naturally felt like it was something he  _must_ try after all. The Dark Lord was wrong about him. He was rarely obedient where it counted. But he was getting ahead of himself—he did not yet even have the most basic idea of how occlumency worked.

If the Dark Lord got any wind of these insubordinate thoughts, he made no indication of it.

“Very well… that is all for tonight. You may go now.”

The Dark Lord made a casual gesture towards the fireplace, so Harry figured that meant he could use the floo. He nodded, murmured, “Thank you sir, and, er, good night,” and scurried over to inspect the peacock statue. Unsure of how it worked, he braced himself for embarrassment and tapped his wand against it, but fortunately, that was the correct action and its tail bloomed, sending the fire flaring green.

“Sixty-six Knockturn Alley!” Harry said, and was sucked away.

Ignoring the judgmental stares and low hooting of the public owls, he dusted off some soot before tugging his invisibility cloak out of his pocket and draping it over himself. Judging by the damp air and the rhythmic patter against the roof, it was still raining heavily, so he cast the impervius charm again.

He ventured outside through the smallest crack in the door, but his caution was unnecessary. There was no one in sight. And why would there be? Nobody in their right mind ought to be out and about in a graveyard during a thunderstorm.

Harry crept over to plot D-12 and slid open the coffin door as slowly and smoothly as he could, half expecting Petri to be staring up at him icily or Rosenkol to appear inches from his face. But when he’d worked the gap wide enough to fit through, it was clear that the coffin house was as dark as the graveyard. Nobody was home.

Abandoning stealth, he dropped down onto the staircase and shoved the lid closed. Mindful of erasing evidence of his having gone out, he removed his dripping garments—the impervius charm did not stop water from accumulating on top of flat surfaces—and blasted them with the hot-air charm on the top step. Then he hung his regular cloak back up and hid his invisibility cloak under the bed again.

The Dark Lord’s invisibility spell—disillusionment, Harry thought it was, had been convenient, but he thought he preferred his cloak. Not being able to see his own body had been less than ideal. Still, it would not hurt to learn a charm like that for when he was without the cloak.

Before that, he reminded himself, he had an assignment from the Dark Lord. There had been no date specified by which Silviu was supposed to forget about Harry’s visions, but he supposed that only meant he should complete his task as soon as possible.

Other people knew too—the whole rest of the company board and Petri. Harry was sure he had no hope of memory charming Petri, but since he was reasonably sure that the Dark Lord had not found out about him knowing, he could just let that small matter lie. Who was Petri going to tell, anyway? Nobody even knew who Harry was.

The changing of fate would work on Silviu, Shy, and Ness. He felt a little bad for deciding to use it after having assured his new friends that nothing of the sort would befall them, but it was just one little memory, and it wouldn’t hurt them.

All this assumed that removing one memory only would not be that difficult, which Harry wasn’t sure about. So far he had only changed the fates of reanimated animals, and at a very high level. He was sure, however, that Petri would be glad to teach him and would easily condone his practising on their neighbours. After all, he thought them sub-human.

The human board members would be trickier. Harry would have to use the memory charm, which he didn’t even know how to cast, and wasn’t sure he could learn. Based on the research he had done in the library about the charm, it was very difficult to get right and was not even taught at Hogwarts. The last thing he wanted was to permanently mess people up.

No. A horrible idea suddenly occurred to him. If he was changing Silviu’s fate anyway, couldn’t he simply make it so that Silviu thought he needed to obliviate Annette and Mr Moribund about the visions? That must be what Petri had meant, that altering memories was more powerful than it seemed. The reminder of an idea, of having to do something—that, too, was a sort of memory.

Harry shook his head. It seemed wrong, like overstepping another boundary even beyond the first sort of memory changing. Removing a memory to protect some information was one thing. Adding one, on the other hand, was something more nefarious.

And anyway, it wasn’t like he knew how to do either thing yet. It might be out of his reach.

Harry was disturbed from his plotting by a sharp popping sound. It was Rosenkol, funeral shroud in some disarray but with a triumphant gleam in his eye as he clutched an armful of yellow flowers with spiky leaves.

“Wow, that’s brilliant Rosenkol, thanks,” Harry said, searching the elf’s face for any sign of disapproval, any hint that his absence had been discovered. Nothing. Relaxing, he retrieved his herbology reference and laid out the fluxweed to dry per its storage instructions. He set aside only a few fresh stalks for the potion that he was going to brew, the obfuscation ointment.

It was a third-year potion. Harry wondered what made it harder than first- or second-year potions. He knew that some potions required specific charms to be cast during the brewing process, but this did not appear to be one of them, and the instructions were not overly complex.

Harry hauled his cauldron out from under his bed, surreptitiously wrapping the philosopher’s stone book in his invisibility cloak as he scooped it out. It occurred to him suddenly that Petri did not seem to have any potion-making equipment, like a hot plate. Nor did they have a stove or fireplace.

“Hey, Rosenkol,” he called softly. The elf appeared at the corner of his eye and he jumped a little despite himself. “Is there somewhere I could make a fire, to make this potion?”

His mind jumped to the public floo, but that seemed like a sort of disastrous idea—what if somebody came through the fireplace while he was brewing?

Rosenkol shook his head, tugging at his ears. “It is not being wise to make a fire here. Best if Wizardling waits for Master to return.”

Harry, who had only wanted to make the potion for appearances anyway, and so that Rosenkol’s ingredient gathering efforts would not have been in vain, agreed easily.

Petri returned early in the morning. He eyed the cauldron on the table sceptically when Harry asked him about where to brew a potion.

“Why bother brewing when you can pay a small sum for a better product?” he asked, which was definitely an odd sentiment coming from Petri. Harry gathered that the man must be pants at potions. “Surely they did not give you practical homework for the summer?”

“No, it’s not homework,” Harry said.

“What is it then?” Petri asked.

“Obfuscation ointment,” Harry said. Petri blinked.

“Is the effect different from a concealment charm?” he asked.

Flummoxed,  Harry opened his potions text to the appropriate page and read the description aloud. “The obfuscation ointment conceals imperfections in the skin for up to twelve hours.”

He flushed when Petri raised an eyebrow at him. “There are some cosmetic charms that do the same thing,” said the man. “Surely it is not worth going to the extra effort just to make the effect immune to a  _finite_ ?”

Harry could not exactly disagree. He shrugged awkwardly. “It’s not important anyway. Actually, now that you’re back, I wanted to learn how to change fates on people. Vampires.”

Petri blinked at him. “What brought this on?” he asked. Harry wished he had had the forethought to be subtler.

“I had another vision about the Dark Lord,” he lied. “Nothing important, but I was thinking, if I don’t want him to know about the visions, it’s bad that Silviu knows, right?”

“So you want to remove his memory of a fact? That might be difficult as it has been so long since he learned it. You have no idea what other related memories might have already formed in the meantime,” Petri said.

“But it’s possible?” Harry asked.

Petri nodded. “Certainly possible. Let me eat something, and we can get started,” he said.

His definition of ‘eat something’ was to down a potion while Rosenkol looked on in disapproval, so Harry did not bother to sit down. Petri tossed the vial into Rosenkol’s waiting palm and they descended into the depths of the trunk.

“Changing a sentient creature’s fate will be rather different from what you’ve already tried with your own animations,” Petri told Harry as he began to withdraw materials from various cabinets and lay them on the work table. The pensieve came out, along with a thick stack of notes on parchment and an entire rack of vials full of blood. “Since you are only able to target memories rather than the will itself, the technique is more precise, but less accurate. Do you understand the difference?”

“No. I thought those are the same thing,” Harry said.

“Precision is about how narrow the spell is. In this case, you target specific memories, and not general types of behaviour. Accuracy is how likely the spell is to be correct, to do what you wish it to do. It is difficult to hit exactly the right memory, though normally, the error is not too significant as long as you know what you’re doing,” Petri explained. “Changing even one memory will generally force others to change in order to maintain consistency.”

“So is the incantation different? And what am I supposed to cast the spells _on_?” Harry asked, it only now occurring to him that all his previous attempts at fate changing had involved animated corpses in the same room as him.

“You will cast on the memory itself, in the pensieve,” Petri said, gesturing to the basin. “The spell is the same. Once you have altered the memory to your satisfaction, you will need to replace the original memory by visiting the victim in a dream. Naturally, that means they must be unconscious, and in order to make the dream visit you will need the remains of some dead person who has some relation to them.”

“So I need something from Silviu, ideally?” Harry asked, fairly certain that vampires counted as dead for this purpose.

“Yes, for the final step. For now, you can start by creating the memories you want to use,” Petri said, flipping through the stack of notes. Upon closer examination, they consisted of cramped blocks of text wedged between swathes of enchanter’s shorthand.

“What’s that?” Harry asked.

“Manual for the pensieve,” Petri said, carelessly shoving unwanted pages aside, some fluttering to the floor. “It's enchanted to correct memories so that they are as close to reality as possible. Trying to alter them while those enchantments are active is incredibly difficult, almost futile. But it’s possible to temporarily deactivate the function, if I can just find where it is… ach ja, Quatsch!”

Cursing, he tossed the entire stack aside and rummaged around in another cupboard, producing more parchments. “This is it,” he muttered, turning back and twirling his wand in a circle at the pensieve. All the shorthand symbols on the outside of the bowl glowed silver. Still consulting the notes, he began to do a complex series of wand movements, causing some of the markings to go dim, and then tapped the side of the pensieve repeatedly, apparently waiting for something. At length, he removed his wand and nodded to Harry.

“So do I start with my own memory?” Harry asked.

“That should work for your intention, yes?” said Petri. “You do not have his memory, after all, so yours is the closest thing.”

“How did you get his memory when you did this last time?” Harry asked, brow furrowing. He remembered doing reconstruction, which he was sure also required some part of the deceased’s body.

“I took his blood while he was stupefied,” Petri said casually, as if stealing somebody’s blood to use it for dark magic were an everyday matter. “Unfortunately, I used it all.”

“Does it have to be blood, for the dream?” Harry asked, wondering how in the world he was supposed to get his hands on that now. “What about hair or something?”

Petri grimaced. “Blood is the best option available. Normally, bone is the most accurate, but obviously not obtainable in this case. Then flesh and blood, and finally nails and hair. The last are very difficult to work with.”

“I can’t just walk up to him and stun him,” Harry pointed out. Petri gave him a confused look.

“You have practically free access to his blood,” he said.

“What?” said Harry, who was sure he had no such thing.

“Ask to drink it. I’m sure he’ll be elated,” Petri said.

Harry made a face. “But it’ll be in my stomach then. And I thought it’s bad for me to drink it?” he demanded.

“You have, apparently, tasted it at least once. More makes no difference,” Petri told him, rolling his eyes. “And don’t be dense. Ask him to put it in a container and drink from that—there will inevitably be residue. That will be enough.”

Harry nodded, feeling foolish. There was no way he was going to drink blood directly from Silviu’s vein anyway. That sounded incredibly disgusting and awkward.

“Does that mean I can leave the house?” Harry asked hopefully.

Petri gave him a critical look and then deadpanned, “On your birthday. Perhaps feeling older will make you less prone to trouble.”

“Thanks,” said Harry flatly. What a brilliant birthday present—being allowed to leave his own house. Actually, it probably _was_ the best birthday present he had ever received, which was depressing. To think he had only had to state his intention to go drink some vampire blood to merit it!

Thoughts of his birthday reminded him that Neville’s birthday was, naturally, also imminent. Perhaps he could send him some accessories for his remembrall. Petri had things like a wristband with a tiny glass display that would change colours in tune with a remembrall in one’s pocket, or a tuner which made it possible to customise the smoke’s colour scheme entirely.

Petri left Harry alone to do his memory modification before he could bring it up. For now, Harry focused on the admittedly blurry memory of the night of his first vision, when Silviu had barged into the house, and pulled a silvery thread out of his temple, which he let fall into the pensieve. Uncertainly, he tapped the edge of the basin to play the memory on the surface.

It was wavy and disjointed, more like a reconstruction than the usual crisp product of the pensieve. Harry supposed that was the effect of the enchantments Petri had disabled.

What should he change the memory to? He supposed he couldn’t just remove Silviu entirely—no doubt the vampire remembered coming to the house.

“Did you have a nightmare?” Memory-Silviu asked in a tiny voice.

Yes, that could work, Harry thought, if he made Silviu just think it had only been a dream. But how could he possibly explain why Silviu had taken the contents of a nightmare seriously enough to call a meeting over it?

Of course—Harry had other evidence that the Dark Lord would return, the same evidence that he had presented to a sceptical Ness at the meeting, namely that he had personally handed him the philosopher’s stone.

“ _Erudito_ ,” Harry cast at the pensieve, imagining the part he would change.

When he played the memory again, a weird fog rolled in during Harry and Silviu’s exchange, with Harry’s voice echoing discordantly in the background, saying, “Yeah, just a nightmare…”

Harry winced. Of course, he had only been thinking about himself and what he would say, and had completely neglected all the surroundings. He now suspected that editing the memory to an acceptable level of quality was going to take a rather long time, which explained why Petri had left.

With a sigh, Harry tried  _erudito_ again for a split second, taking care to imagine things in as much detail as possible. He was rewarded with a literal beat of reasonable fidelity, before mist was everywhere again.

He stifled a groan. The Dark Lord had better appreciate his efforts.


	40. Donor

Being allowed out of the house at last was alas, Harry’s only birthday present from Petri, but that was all right because his friends sent him cards and sweets, and Hannah had knitted him a stuffed eagle wearing a witch’s cap.

Harry had not yet bothered going out, anyway, as he was not nearly finished with changing the memory. And besides, if he was going to go to all that trouble to get Silviu’s blood, he needed to do everything at once. There was no way he was getting Shy’s and Ness’s blood too, so Silviu was going to need to go out and  memory charm everybody.

The problem was that Harry could not see how he could get Silviu to simultaneously believe that the information about the visions was too important to be left in the minds of even his closest confidants, and that the visions were not real. If he were simply concerned about spreading misinformation, it would make much more sense for him to tell the board that the visions were false instead of modifying memories. Or perhaps Harry could just leave the board alone—after all, none of them had solid evidence of his visions. Most likely they had already forgotten all about the matter.

Harry figured his effective deadline was September first, when he would have to go back to Hogwarts. Probably it was even earlier than that, if the Dark Lord had any  other  instructions to give him, but so far, he had had no further visions.

The sound of footsteps startled him from his  _erudito_ charm, and the memory  spiralled into formless mist. Harry turned to see Petri eyeing the pensieve critically.

“You’ve been working on that for days,” Petri said. “Surely it is adequate.”

He waved Harry aside and flicked his wand, coaxing silvery figures out of the surface. Harry on his bed, Silviu rushing down the stairs, shaking him awake.

“Did you have a nightmare?”

“Yeah,” memory-Harry said. There was a little wavering and warping, but not much more than had naturally been present at the start.

“You had a _dream_ about the Dark Lord?” Silviu asked. There was a slight tear where Harry had decided to cut a part of the memory entirely—apparently, _obliviate_ worked on the pensieve memory as one might expect, though Harry didn’t think it would be nearly as easy to get right on a person when he couldn’t see what he was erasing.

“He’s back,” said memory Harry. It didn’t completely make sense, but Harry thought it passed cursory inspection.

“This looks fine,” Petri said, sending the scene splashing back into the basin. “Nobody naturally has pensieve-clear memories. Our minds do a great amount of work to make everything feel consistent even when it isn’t.”

“All right,” Harry said, not feeling as pleased as he’d expected about being done.

He did not set off to see Silviu yet, reasoning that it was the evening of the thirty-first and so technically still his birthday, and he should enjoy himself.

His newfound freedom was put to use in Diagon Alley, where he browsed the colourful, magical displays in the windows,  treated himself  to some overpriced but delightful ice cream from Florean Fortescue’s, and eventually ended up in front of Quality Quidditch Supplies where a gaggle of older teens were ogling a broom with a sleek black handle. Harry pressed closer to see the stylish silver lettering embossed on the stained wood:  _Nimbus 2001._ No doubt it was the new sequel to the top-of-the-line Nimbus Two Thousand that Terry had spent all term pining for. The price tag hanging in the corner read, “G297.”

“Yikes,” he muttered. Three hundred galleons was more than Petri’s shop made in a month, if one did not count any illicit side dealings. Still, he felt a stab of raw longing in his chest. He knew he could afford it. With a professional racing broom like that, he was sure he could crush the competition and make it into the relays, maybe even become champion. Or even better, get on the Quidditch team. Captain Birch had finished school, and Patil had announced at the end of term that he was quitting the team next year to focus on his NEWTs, so beater and seeker spots would both be open.

Harry sighed, his fantasies crushed by the reality of living with an evil knut-pincher. If he brought that broom home, squandering his own money or not, there was no doubt in his mind that Petri was going to lash him within an inch of his life, insulting his judgment the whole time. And  _that_ was what he couldn’t afford—losing Petri’s already tenuous trust in his competence.

“We’re going to destroy those Gryffindorks this year… I can’t wait to see their faces. Flint said…”

Harry’s head whipped around as he heard a familiar, nasally drawl. The gleam of platinum-blond hair in the waning light caught Harry’s eye. Draco Malfoy had just stepped out of Quality Quidditch Supplies, flanked by Lucius Malfoy and an equally blond woman who must be Draco’s mother. Harry wondered if his parents were related. That would explain a lot.

Before Harry could decide which way to slip away, Draco glanced to the side and caught his eye.

“Harry, fancy meeting you here,” he greeted, despite the fact that they were decidedly acquainted only as mutual friends of Vince.

“Hi Draco,” Harry said, not disguising his lack of enthusiasm. “I live nearby, so it’s not that surprising,” he said, though it was hardly the case that he visited Diagon Alley often. Behind an oblivious Draco, Harry saw Lucius Malfoy’s eyes widen in recognition.

That was right. Malfoy couldn’t know who Harry Potter was, but he surely remembered the boy whom the Dark Lord had used to steal something from the Department of Mysteries just days ago. Harry met his gaze momentarily, keeping his face carefully blank, and then tore his eyes away in case Malfoy somehow knew legilimency.

“Guess what?” said Draco, and before Harry could guess anything, continued, “I’m going to get the Nimbus Two Thousand and One. I’ll be sure to get on Dragon team this year. And that’s if I’m not made Slytherin seeker.”

“Okay… that’s nice,” Harry said, blinking in irritation. He wondered why Draco was bragging to somebody he hardly knew. Besides, he wasn’t impressed. Harry had seen Draco fly before, on the rare occasions when he deigned to turn up to broom racing practice, and while he wasn’t half-bad, he would whinge incessantly about how terrible the school brooms were and storm off when he couldn’t beat the second years at the obstacle course. Harry doubted a better broom was what he was missing.

Then again, hadn’t Harry only just been thinking along the same lines? Perhaps he was a little envious.

All right, he was very envious and a little resentful.

“Are you finally getting your own broom?” Draco asked, glancing back to the shop. “You’ll need to go inside to do that.”

“I know that, thanks,” Harry muttered. Draco smirked. He was being uncommonly friendly, in his own sarcastic way. Harry wondered if there was something he wanted besides somebody to boast to.

“I can introduce you to the shopkeeper,” Draco said. “Ask him to let you take a test ride on the brooms. Unfortunately, he hasn’t got any Nimbus Two Thousand and Ones left, unless you want the display one.” He made a face, showing what he thought of that. Harry assumed that was why there was no broom-shaped package in his arms.

“Very unfortunate,” Harry began, about to tell Draco that thanks, he was not interested, but the blond boy interrupted him with an imperious hand and turned to his parents.

“Mother, Father, I know you have business tonight. You don’t have to stay while I show Harry here how a real broomstick flies,” Draco said.

Draco’s mother brought up a hand to hide a smile, and his father looked unimpressed with his poor attempt at losing them.

“And where are your parents, Mr…” Mr Malfoy asked Harry.

“Potter,” Harry supplied, laughing to himself as all three Malfoys were struck silly by the fidelius, their minds twisting in knots to avoid making the obvious but impossible inference to his full name.

“Mr Potter,” Mr Malfoy finally managed after a few beats, “It’s quite late to be out alone.”

Harry raised his eyebrows. It wasn’t even eight yet. They had been out later than this just a few nights ago, robbing the Ministry of Magic.

“I live just down the street,” Harry told him, not specifying which street. “My uncle has a shop in the Alley.”

Mr Malfoy stiffened all of sudden, and Harry felt a twinge of pain in his scar. His eyes slid down to the man’s covered left arm, wondering if he had perhaps just been summoned by the Dark Lord.

“Lucius, what is it?” Draco’s mother asked in a low voice. “Is it…?”

Mr Malfoy gave a tiny nod. “Draco, we’re leaving,” he barked.

“What? But Father, we just got here,” Draco began to whinge.

“Lucius, maybe it would be saf—better for him to stay here, with his friend?” his mother whispered, and Draco shut up instantly, nodding in agreement though he obviously did not understand what was going on.

Mr Malfoy hesitated, but relented after a second, glancing around nervously. His wife had already taken Draco aside. “Call for Dobby if you need anything. Floo home before nine, and don’t leave Diagon Alley. Stay with your friend—I don’t want you to go wandering alone, it’s not safe.”

“Yes Mother, I know, I won’t,” Draco hissed, turning pink with embarrassment.

Harry wanted to protest that nobody had asked his agreement, but the elder Malfoys apparated away post-haste, obviously not wanting to keep the Dark Lord waiting.

A little curious, Harry focused on the thought of the Dark Lord, wondering if he could trigger a vision, but nothing happened. Giving up, he turned to Draco and said, “I’m not going to be your babysitter all night. I have things to do.”

Draco sneered. “Of course,” he said. “Mother treats me like I’m an infant. Just don’t tell her anything if you see her, and we’re fine. Did you want to look at brooms though? I was serious.”

“No thanks,” Harry said. “I can’t buy one. My uncle would kill me.”

“Why? Can’t you afford it?” Draco asked suspiciously, shrinking back a little as if poverty were a contagious disease.

“Yes. Doesn’t mean I’m allowed to buy whatever I want,” Harry said, not sure why he was bothering. He should have just claimed that he was penniless to make the other boy go away. How did Vince put up with his constant grandstanding?

Draco looked confused, as if he could not imagine not being allowed to buy something he wanted, for any reason.

“You said you live here?” Draco asked him. “What’s that like?”

Harry blinked at him in incredulity. Was Draco trying to invite himself to Harry’s house? He said, “I live in Knockturn Alley, in a graveyard.”

If he thought that that would repel Draco, he had been sorely mistaken, because the boy perked up with genuine interest.

“Knockturn Alley? And you said your uncle has a shop there? You must show me,” he said.

“Your mother said not to leave Diagon Alley,” Harry pointed out.

“Mother also said not to leave your side,” said Draco. Harry sighed.

“I’m not protecting you if a hag tries to eat you,” he said.

“There are _hags_?” Draco asked in entirely the wrong tone. He was grinning from ear to ear.

Harry started walking, vowing to chat up the first fingernail-peddling hag he laid eyes on. Maybe then Draco would shut up. Permanently.

Where Diagon Alley was winding down for the day, most shoppers having finished or retired to the Leaky Cauldron for a bite to eat, Knockturn Alley was only just beginning to liven up for the night. There were plenty of people no doubt headed for the Wyvern, not all of them human, and street vendors had begun to emerge out of shadowy corners, hawking questionable potions ingredients and sham amulets.

No hags, alas. Perhaps they were still restocking on human nails, which Harry was pretty sure were leavings from their meals, used to make a quick sickle off idiot teenagers trying to dabble in dark magic.

“It’s not so different from Diagon, even at night,” Draco was saying, sniffing haughtily.

Harry was tempted to introduce him to some vampires just to get him to piss himself, but he knew that it would be a childish and dangerous thing to do. Vampires had enough to deal with from hateful wizards already; they didn’t need the likes of Lucius Malfoy coming down on them.

“Harry! Long time no see, boy,” said somebody in a croaky, sing-song voice. Harry looked around for Leticia and was confused when he saw no hags, only a dimpled grandmother hobbling towards him from down the street, the tip of her little pointed hat flopping in the wind.

He did not respond, still confounded by her identity. It had to be Leticia… nobody else he knew talked like that.

“Where have you been lurking these days? No sign of you at the shop,” said the old woman, stopping hardly a foot in front of him and reaching out to pat his arm. Her nails were pointed and black, and now that Harry looked closer, he thought he recognised that thick, curly hair and those gleaming dark eyes, but not in that adorable, perfectly symmetrical face with its button nose and decidedly non-green skin.

“Leticia?” he said uncertainly, and the lady broke out into familiar peals of laughter, grating like cracked glass. “What happened to your face?”

“Oh it’s nothing, just a little beauty potion,” Leticia said, flicking an errant lock of hair aside. “Like what you see?” She fluttered her eyelashes and Harry made a gagging sound.

“Maybe in a century. Are you going somewhere?” Harry asked suspiciously, glancing back the way he’d come.

“The Cauldron,” she said, grinning widely and revealing some of her inhuman teeth, viciously sharp carnassials peeking from the edges of her yellow smile. Harry saw Draco take a step back from the corner of his eye, which drew Leticia’s attention. “And who is this handsome fellow?”

“This is—” Harry began, but Draco finished for him.

“Draco Malfoy,” he said, not holding out a hand. He had a sort of constipated expression on his face.

“Leticia Rabe, at your service,” said the hag, curtsying so jerkily that she almost toppled over. She cackled again before blowing a kiss to Harry and skipping off.

“That was a hag?” Draco asked after a beat. “It wasn’t as ugly as I thought. Not that frightening. Terrible manners, of course, but what can you expect from riff-raff?”

Ignoring the fact that Draco had called Leticia an ‘ it,’ which Harry figured was unavoidable given the sort of pureblood he was, he said, “That was after a beauty potion. And you haven’t seen her while she’s eating people, that’d give you a scare.”

Harry hadn’t seen it either, but he could imagine.

Draco scoffed. “She can’t eat people, that’s against the law,” he said.

Harry didn’t say anything, suddenly unsure.

His silence seemed to unnerve Draco, who pressed, “She doesn’t, does she?”

Harry shrugged. “Come on. You wanted to see my uncle’s shop, didn’t you?”

This seemed to be the right change of subject, because Draco brightened up and nodded eagerly. “Father promised to buy me a present. I need to find something I want… What sorts of things does your uncle sell?”

“All sorts of enchanted things, mostly glass,” Harry told him, steering him towards the right, past Borgin and Burke’s. He almost regretted the move when he spotted Petri’s face through the window. The man wasn’t looking in Harry’s direction—he was engrossed in conversation with Professor Snape, of all people.

“Is that Professor Snape?” Draco demanded, and they both paused outside the shop. “What’s he doing here?”

“Buying something?” Harry guessed, since Snape had come to the shop before. Shrugging, he pressed forward, but was stopped by Draco grabbing his arm and pulling him back.

He ripped himself out of the other boy’s grasp, frowning.

“We can’t go in there. Snape will tell my parents he saw me,” Draco hissed.

“How is he supposed to know that you aren’t supposed to be here?” Harry pointed out.

“My father says he can read minds,” Draco whispered with increasing urgency, backing out of the rectangle of light. “I’m not making this up, I swear,” he added, when Harry stared at him incredulously, but that wasn’t what Harry was thinking.

How did so many people apparently know legilimency, despite its alleged difficulty to learn? How was he supposed to protect secrets of any kind, especially matters of life and death like the Dark Lord’s secrets, when there were people like his professors and headmaster who could just pluck that information from his mind?

The Dark Lord had better arrange his occlumency lessons soon.

“Fine. I have places to be anyway,” Harry said. He would lose Draco and go ask Silviu for his blood, and then he would finish his assignment. Two days to fulfill his task—surely that would satisfy the Dark Lord?

“Like where?” Draco asked, dogging his steps. Harry stopped, gritting his teeth. He couldn’t let Draco just follow him across the street.

“Nothing exciting,” he said. “If you want to look for rubbish to buy, go to Borgin and Burkes.” He indicated the store next door with a toss of his head.

“My father’s mentioned them before,” Draco said.

“So? They probably can’t read minds,” Harry pointed out. If it turned out that random, non-vampire shopkeepers also knew legilimency, he thought he might as well lock himself up in an underground vault forever and hope that nobody came looking.

“I suppose so. Come on,” said Draco.

“I’m not going with you,” Harry said.

“I’m not going alone,” Draco insisted, all his bravado apparently finished off by a mere glimpse of Professor Snape. Well, he was a Slytherin, Harry supposed, and they weren’t known for courage.

“Go home then,” Harry suggested. “Or go to the Cauldron.”

“What’s so important that you have to do anyway?” Draco demanded, looking equally frustrated.

“Homework,” Harry lied, hoping that was a sufficiently stereotypical answer.

“Are you serious? Homework,” Draco repeated, rolling his eyes. “We’re on holiday and you’re doing homework.”

“We were in fact assigned summer work,” Harry pointed out.

“Doesn’t mean _you_ have to do it,” Draco told him, as if he were slow. Harry narrowed his eyes. “Have you even got a house elf?”

“Yes,” Harry said automatically, thrown by the question. “What does that—are you saying you make your house elf do your homework?”

Draco looked wary at Harry’s accusatory tone, and said, “Not  _all_ of it, just the tedious things, you know, star charts and research about goblin rebellions. You don’t think those things are actually worth doing, do you?”

“Well, no, but…” Harry couldn’t disagree that Hogwarts assigned its fair share of pointless busywork. Still, this sort of blatant cheating did not sit with him the right way. “So this is how Vince and Goyle passed all their classes!”

“Obviously, I mean, could you imagine those two lumps actually writing their own homework?” Draco drawled, apparently glad to be back on familiar conversational ground.

“They aren’t even literate, last time I checked, so no,” Harry agreed. “And the teachers don’t know about this?”

“They must,” said Draco, shrugging. “But how would they prove it? Besides, house elf work is mediocre. They’re stupid little blighters. I wouldn’t let one get near one of my Transfiguration essays—I’d probably get a T. Father’s already been on me about my marks, because I did worse than a mud—I mean, Granger.” Draco paused, looking a little pale.

Harry was mystified by this sudden change of subject to something that seemed private. Shouldn’t Draco be complaining about his father to his actual friends? Instead of voicing this suggestion, he said, “You can say mudblood, you know. I won’t get offended.”

“Oh, I thought you were friends with… never mind,” Draco muttered, coughing.

“I am friends with Hermione,” Harry said. “I wouldn’t let you call her that to her face. And everybody got worse marks than her, so don’t act like you’re something special. She was top of the class.”

Draco nodded. “I told Father that the teachers all have favourites, and I can’t help if they’re blood traitors who don’t care about wizarding blood.”

Harry was a little amused that Draco was complaining about lack of favouritism on account of his ancestry.

“Aren’t Vince and Goyle pureblood?” Harry asked. He tried to imagine a world where they got higher marks than Hermione. She would burn the school down.

“Their families are really old-fashioned. Don’t care about their marks, just their magic. I wish my father was like that sometimes,” Draco said, sighing. “But he says it’s important to keep up with the times, so we can get the respect befitting our blood.”

Yeah, that sounded like something that slimy Lucius Malfoy would say, Harry thought. He grunted.

For some reason, Draco flushed at that. “Look, let’s get away from here before Snape comes out,” he said, glancing around. He pressed his lips together with resolve and pushed open the door to Borgin and Burkes, holding it open for Harry with a raised eyebrow.

Appalled by this underhanded move, Harry strode inside deliberately. Unlike Draco, he had every right to be here. He ignored Silviu’s admonishing voice inside his head and glanced over at the counter. Fortunately, it was early enough that it was Borgin and not Burke staffing the shop.

“Can I help you lads?” Borgin asked, his voice unbearably smarmy as he shuffled over like a giant vulture. Harry almost recoiled, but held himself in check. Draco didn’t seem to know what to say—he was probably used to hiding behind his father.

“We’re looking for something interesting or useful,” Harry said. It came out lamer than he had intended.

“As a present,” Draco added, affecting his usual drawl. Harry supposed he wasn’t lying—it was to be a present for himself.

“Very good. Please, have a look around, and let me know if something catches your eye,” said Borgin.

“Don’t touch anything,” Harry hissed to Draco, who was already reaching for a desiccated hand mounted on a base. “Most of this stuff is cursed.” He couldn’t believe Borgin was just letting them go around without even a warning.

“Good eye, lad. That’s the Hand of Glory, best friend of thieves and plunderers. Grants light only to the holder,” Borgin said, giving Draco a craggy smile.

“That does seem useful,” Harry said. “How much is it?”

“Hey, I saw it first,” Draco muttered.

Borgin quoted an absurd price that instantly caused Harry’s heart to clench painfully. “Yeah, and it’s also the first thing you saw. Let’s look around more before deciding,” he told Draco. The rack of books in the back caught his eye again. Even better, they were now on sale for a uniform thirteen sickles each, which was apparently half price.

Draco followed his gaze and immediately sighed. “Books, of course.”

“I don’t even have that many books,” Harry protested. In fact, he owned only one book that wasn’t a school textbook, which must be a record low for somebody in Ravenclaw house.

“Sure,” Draco muttered, following him. He reached out again but immediately recoiled.

“What?” Harry asked, trying to figure out what had given him pause. All he saw were unmarked, dusty covers.

“Dead bodies,” Draco said, shuddering. Harry choked back a laugh. He held out his own hand, not quite touching the spines. He felt nothing beyond a vague impression of earthiness that might well have been just the smell of dust.

“How do you do that?” Harry asked.

“You have to listen for it. You really don’t feel anything? Feels like touching a corpse to me,” Draco said.

“This one?” Harry asked, pointing to a book bound in grey linen. “You’re sure it’s not cursed?” He glanced to Borgin, who jerked his head to indicate the sign above the cart. No guarantees, of course. Harry took out his wand and cast a spell-revealing charm when Borgin made no protest. Several books lit up in his mind’s eye, but the one in question remained unremarkable. He pulled out the thin volume and opened it. The spine creaked, and he saw loopy handwriting on yellowed parchment.

“Do you feel it now?” Draco asked. “Even a squib could feel that. It’s obviously an original.”

Harry frowned, trying to concentrate. He did feel something. In fact, it seemed familiar. He thought suddenly of Ulrich’s body, human but not human, filled with unrelenting ferocity. That ferocity came from lingering resentment, an unfulfilled need to avenge one’s wrongful death.

How had he known that? Petri had never mentioned anything to that effect, he was sure. Harry flipped to another page and held down the stiff parchment, squinting at the messy handwriting. After a few moments he determined that he couldn’t actually read it at all—some of the letters were unfamiliar to him, and only a few words resembled the English he knew, like ‘fyrst’ and ‘aune’. Nonetheless, he realised idly that a ghost would form from the lingering resentment if the body was not animated quickly enough. He turned the page without thinking. Not all was lost in that case. The body could still be reanimated and deliberately imbued with resentment, though artificial resentment was never as powerful as the naturally occurring sort.

A shadow fell onto the page, and Harry’s heart skipped a beat as he saw Borgin’s long form. “This is a shop, not a library,” he said lowly. Harry snapped the book shut.

“I’ll take it,” he said, rummaging around in his pocket for change. He found the thick, ridged form of a galleon, and Borgin’s face immediately regained an obsequious expression as he produced payment.

“Excellent, excellent,” he said, leading Harry up to the counter. “That will be thirteen sickles. Four sickles is your change.”

“I can’t believe you bought that thing,” Draco muttered as they exited the shop. He did not end up purchasing anything himself—apparently, he had no spending money of his own, and relied on wheedling his father to buy him gifts, which Harry found hilarious.

“It’s interesting,” Harry said. “I’ve never had that with other books though, where I could just tell what they said.”

Draco sniffed. “That’s because you learned to read like a muggle,” he said.

“What do you mean?” Harry asked. “Why does that matter? Can’t I do both?”

Draco gave him an impatient look. “Not really. It’s not something you can unlearn, is it? Once you learn to read words, that’s it. You can’t see a word you know and not recognise it. It crowds everything out and you have to read one word at a time. Like a muggle.”

That was right. The book in his hand wasn’t in modern English, was it? He couldn’t read the words the ‘muggle way’, but he had got the gist of the information anyway. He frowned.

“But you know how to read like a muggle, too,” Harry said.

“I had to learn,” Draco said with surprising bitterness. “That’s how it is now, isn’t it? Everything at Hogwarts is printed books and essays, so mudbloods can feel right at home. Who cares if it makes it harder for everyone else to learn magic?”

“Oh,” said Harry.

“I’d better be getting home,” Draco said. “I’ll let you go and do your homework.”

Draco stalked off. Harry said a belated goodbye and watched him go back towards Diagon Alley for a few moments before he turned around and walked in the direction of the cemetery, newly-acquired book tucked under his arm and the matter of his unwelcome ‘homework’ coming back to him.

He did not want to go to Silviu’s just yet, daunted by the prospect of what needed to happen. Petri was definitely wrong—there was no way Silviu was just going to give him blood for nothing. Harry was going to have to pay for it. He was going to have to tell Silviu that he wanted to renew their bond, and that meant Silviu drinking his blood. Not just drinking it, but biting him again. The thought made him feel queasy.

It couldn’t be that bad, he told himself. He was overreacting. This was just like cutting himself for the blood door, a necessary sacrifice.

But it was still his birthday, and he didn’t want to do anything unpleasant on his birthday.

At this point, he was more than halfway home, so he continued the rest of the way and promised himself that he would go to Silviu first thing tomorrow evening.

But the next night, Petri asked him if he wanted to try changing Ulrich’s fate, and make him do more complex things than simply attack living things indiscriminately. The final step to creating useful inferi—that was something he definitely wanted to learn, especially after what he’d read in his new book, so he found himself back in the trunk under Petri’s critical eye.

“ _Erudito_!” Harry cast, with the aim of teaching Ulrich to pick up objects. The inferius was already under the imperius curse and so sat docilely at the table. Harry was burning with questions about the ‘resentment’ the book had mentioned, but didn’t know how to bring it up to Petri without admitting the source of his partial information. He had a feeling that Petri had no books on necromancy for a reason, and did not feel like finding out why the hard way.

The changing of fate obviously came after the basic creation of the aggressive, walking corpse anyway, since there was nothing incomplete about Ulrich as an inferius. Harry was only making an adjustment to its instructions.

Since inferi had once been human, they had the capacity to retain thoughts and memories just as well as a human, if those thoughts and memories were somehow introduced to them. According to Petri, the best way to make a versatile inferius was to imbue it with both a general will so that it knew when to attack and defend, and also specific memories so that it knew how to do these things most effectively.

Harry cast  _erudito_ a few more times, focusing on his own memories of reaching out and closing his hand around some small object. Then he placed a teacup in front of the inferius. Ulrich’s hand shot out and scooped it up instantly, clutching it around its side instead of by the handle, but it was close enough.

Grinning, Harry continued with his project of making an inferius drink tea like a perfectly civilised person as Petri looked on in exasperation.

About halfway through the night, Harry realised that since the inferius was a preserved human corpse, that meant that it could talk. So he taught it to say “please” and “thank you,” with the rather unexpected result that it tried to say “thank you,” every time someone made a move in its general direction.

“ _Silencio!_ ” Petri cast at it, irritated after enduring five minutes of this behaviour. “This is ridiculous. It’s not a doll. _Corrigio!_ ”

Harry winced as the purple curse hit him head on, drawing a series of stinging lines across his chest. He supposed the constant stream of robotic gratitude had been pretty annoying, and he might have deserved that. Still, he thought what he was trying to do made sense in general.

“If you think about it, he’s kind of like a giant action figure,” Harry argued. “Why don’t people use inferi to do useful things, like mop floors or wash dishes? Seems like a waste to leave them lying around to ambush people when you can do things like this.”

Harry placed the teapot at a preordained location on the table and Ulrich reached out, took it (by the handle!) and poured water out, somewhat sloppily, into a cup.

Petri’s jaw dropped at this question. “I cannot even begin—firstly, there are house elves, or far simpler spells for any… task you could realistically charm an inferius to do. Most inferi are also not as well-preserved as Ulrich. They’ll rot like any other corpse. Not something you want to keep in your presence. Also illegal, may I remind you.”

Harry shrugged. “This is fun.”

Petri rolled his eyes, stood up, and walked out of the room. Harry felt a little nervous at that—it was technically possible for him to lose control and end up mauled by the inferius, but he would probably be all right.

Ulrich took the cup and raised it to his lips, pouring water all over himself.

That was right… he needed to open his mouth.

“ _Erudito!_ ” he cast again.

Petri allowed Harry to leave Ulrich operational in the hexagon room during the day. When they went to check on the inferius the next evening, it had a small puddle around its feet, full of shards of broken china, which it was repeatedly picking up and raising, before dropping again. Harry was dismayed that something had gone wrong in the tea-drinking routine. Petri just rolled his eyes again at the whole affair, repairing the mess with a sweep of his wand and nailing the inferius with an imperius curse before it could try to grab the teacup again.

“They do exactly what you charm them to and nothing more when you try to get this specific,” he said. “Still, I’m confident you’ll be able to charm one normally, at least. Perhaps you should work on your human animation next.”

Harry was a little disappointed to cut his project short, but nodded anyway. He privately suspected Petri just didn’t want to watch him continue to pervert the dark arts into something frivolous.

Petri let Harry pull open the long drawer and command Ulrich to lie down inside it. Whatever charms were on the drawer activated and all tension vanished from the body, as if it had just fallen asleep. Harry gave a great heave and the box slid noisily on its rollers until it reached the end with a thud.

The muggle corpse that Rosenkol had procured for Harry to practise on was stored in a similar drawer, though under an ordinary stasis charm of the sort used to preserve potion ingredients. Harry cast  _mobilicorpus_ to manoeuvre it out and dropped it on the floor, stepping back and wrinkling his nose as the strong odour of formaldehyde billowed across the room, sticking in the back of his throat. At least it wasn’t a rotting mess. That would be infinitely worse.

The body was that of an old man, yellowish and a little blotchy but still reasonably fresh. Harry took care not to look at its slack face and lolling, sunken eyes and instead pointed his wand at a limp hand.

“ _Locomotor_ ,” he said, executing a by now instinctive motion with his wand. The hand twitched, not in a lifelike way but jerkily, like a scrabbling insect. Harry shuddered slightly.

“You can move on to the elbow,” Petri suggested. “The larger joints will be your next greatest obstacle.”

Harry obligingly pointed his wand at the elbow. “ _Locomotor!_ ” All that happened was that the hand stopped moving, which Harry knew was expected. Trying to animate the entire body with a single charm would be overly ambitious for any but the most experienced of wizards. A workaround was to animate one part at a time in quick succession.

Unfortunately, animating parts of things was difficult when Harry was unused to thinking of them as their own wholes. The hands were all right. For some reason, a disembodied hand as its own creature seemed plausible. Disembodied elbow… not so much while the rest of the body was in plain view.

And of course, he was going to have to be able animate every moving part so well that he could do it in his sleep. If there was a single stumble or failed animation in the whole lot, the body would end up dysfunctional, and the spells to turn it from a fleshy marionette into a true inferius would be exponentially more difficult to apply.

Harry felt more respect for Petri’s inferi making business now. The man had made it look so easy, just waving his wand over a body like an orchestra conductor and raising the dead to do his bidding. Now that he knew the stupid amount of precision and effort it took not only to animate the body but also to make it useful, he thought it was no wonder so many dark wizards paid someone else to do it.

Petri left him to his practice once it became clear that Harry was not about to make any miraculous progress. By lunchtime, he had still failed to even coax a twitch out of the elbow, and trying to animate the whole arm at once had resulted in fizzing sparks bursting out of his wand with enough force that the recoil knocked him over. He had given that up quickly and decided to go upstairs to eat and to relate this mishap to Petri, so that he could understand what had gone wrong.

“Just a backfire, from building too much magic in your wand with no outlet,” Petri said. “I’m surprised this has never happened to you before. Have your classmates not had similar incidents?”

Harry thought back to charms class and he vaguely remembered somebody setting their feather on fire trying to do the levitation charm, and some singed eyebrows. He shrugged. “I suppose there were some explosions. But I thought those were because of not having enough intent. I swear I knew what I was trying to do.”

“What were you trying to do, then?” Petri asked.

Harry flushed. “The whole arm,” he admitted. Petri sighed.

“You aren’t strong enough for that yet,” he admonished. “When you are first formulating your intent in your mind, that’s when the spell forms. If you cannot gather enough magic to complete the spell, then it will not work as intended, and all the magic that _has_ been gathered will explode out of your wand.”

Harry frowned at the mention of gathering magic. “Is there a way to stop that from happening? Say, to hold it there?”

Petri nodded, “You must maintain focus on the spell without actually casting it. It takes  quite a bit of practice, and I would say is not worth it. Any spell you might go to such lengths to be able to cast probably has less power-intensive alternatives.”

Harry disagreed. “What about the silencing charm? Or the water-making spell? I’d like to be able to cast those,” he said.

“The quietening charm _quietus_ is an alternative to the silencing spell. If you quieten something sufficiently, there is no functional difference from silencing it. As it works on a small area rather than a target, it’s much easier. If you are in desperate need of water, you can transfigure it, which takes much less power than conjuring it,” Petri told him.

“Hmm,” said Harry, annoyed that Petri seemed to have an answer for everything. “Hold on. Can you drink conjured water? What’s the difference between food and water for Gamp’s Law?”

Petri stared at him like he had grown a second head. “Hogwarts is already teaching about Gamp’s Law in first year?”

“Well, no,” Harry said, trying to remember where he had first learned of it. His mind kept jumping to Barty—but he had heard about it before Barty, he was sure. Maybe even before Hogwarts. “I think I read it in a book.”

“Hm. You can drink conjured water, yes, and it slakes thirst, in my experience. I’ve never thought too much of it, but I suppose it is a bit odd that it doesn’t count as food. I do not know. That is a question for a transfigurer or an alchemist,” Petri said.

A little disappointed, Harry nodded, and said, “Speaking of food, have you had lunch yet?”

He knew the answer was no, because Petri didn’t eat food without prompting. The question was for the benefit of a possibly eavesdropping Rosenkol, who indeed popped in a moment later to serve them a spread of open-face sandwiches that he had obviously prepared in advance. Harry gave him a thumbs up and a grin before digging in with relish.

As he finished the last bite of his bread and was debating having another sandwich, he heard a light but distinct tapping from the door above.

Petri pointed his wand at the coffin lid, shoving it a sliver to the side, before muttering, “ _Accio Brief!_ ”

A letter, or rather, a folded note with no envelope, zoomed into his hand. He glanced at it and tossed it to Harry. “For you.”

Harry unfolded the parchment with his thumb and pressed it to the table.

“Company meeting tomorrow night at 8,” was all it said, written in perfect dicta-quill calligraphy. It suddenly occurred to Harry that this was probably the meeting where Silviu would announce whatever agreement the board had come to with the Dark Lord, and what would need to be done going forward. Would he mention anything about Harry’s visions? He wasn’t sure, but it was imperative that he didn’t— _couldn’t._

No longer hungry, Harry stood abruptly, sending his chair scraping along the floor. Petri glanced at him with raised eyebrows.

“Company meeting,” Harry muttered. “I need to change Silviu’s fate before that. Today, while he’s sleeping. How much blood will I need? Are you sure it’ll be enough, if I just use what’s left over from drinking?”

“You will not need more than a thimbleful,” Petri said, indicating the distance between the tip of his finger and the first knuckle. “It may work even with less, as you know him personally.”

Harry nodded, and went to his potion kit to retrieve a crystal phial. It had a faceted bulb, so he figured more blood would cling to the side than on sheer glass. Throwing on his cloak, he ascended the stairs and popped out into a surprisingly dry night. A thin crescent moon smiled overhead, providing just enough light for him to see where he was going.

What was he going to tell Silviu if the vampire asked why he was suddenly interested in renewing the bond? He could probably conceal information, but he wasn’t sure if he could lie outright, even if Silviu was not intentionally trying to see his thoughts. He couldn’t say that he was suddenly all right with the entire vampire business. It just wasn’t true. Even now, he felt a little sick to his stomach, as if he were walking to his doom.

It wasn’t going to be that bad, he tried to tell himself. Realistically, he had endured much worse. He wasn’t afraid of pain, at least, not the sort that wasn’t the cruciatus curse, and he knew that losing a little blood wouldn’t harm him. Drinking blood… well, privately, he could admit to himself that his one experience in memory had been almost pleasant.

So what was he so afraid of? 

He touched the graveyard gate lightly, sending the chains scurrying back with a metallic rattle, and slipped through onto the main street, his boots crunching loudly over mangled knotweed stems. The alley narrowed as tall, crooked buildings sprang up on either side, drawing a vicious wind down its length. It beat at his face, and Harry had to shut his eyes, even behind his glasses. That was fine. He knew the way well enough to walk it blind.

It was the lack of choice, Harry thought, the betrayal of having somebody who had been kind to him suddenly take something from him against his will. People like the Dursleys and Petri had never made any pretensions about caring for his well being beyond their own self-interest. Even the Dark Lord, polite as he usually was, Harry had known from the start not to trust, not least because the man had literally murdered his parents. It was Silviu who was full of contradictions, who claimed he wanted to protect Harry but ended up being the very threat he needed protecting from, who had never stopped apologising, but somehow whose apologies were never enough.

Harry huffed and steeled himself. He was being a big baby about this whole thing. It was just like getting a shot… in the neck, but still—it needed to be done, and that was that.

He wondered briefly if he should do as Petri suggested, and just try to ask for Silviu’s blood outright. No. He dismissed the thought as quickly as it appeared. He couldn’t risk failure, couldn’t let there even be the chance of information about his visions spreading.

Resolute, he threw open the Coffin House door and marched in solemnly, only to stop short.

Silviu wasn’t there. Annette was the one behind the counter.

“Harry,” she called out, waving.

“Hi Annette,” Harry said, biting his lip. “Do you know where Silviu is?”

“He’s been in Transylvania all week,” she informed him.

“Oh. When is he going to be back?” Harry asked, a pit forming in his stomach.

“Tomorrow evening, in time for the meeting,” Annette said. “Is there anything I can help you with?”

“Oh, no. Thanks,” Harry mumbled. He backed up all the way out of the shop. “Right. I’ll just be going. Sorry.”

He ran down the alley for a few unsteady steps, and then slowed to a walk, shaking his head. This wasn’t the end of the world. He would just have to catch Silviu before the meeting and make sure he knew not to mention Harry’s visions.

That plan was foiled when he woke up the next evening and saw that it was five to eight. Leaping out of bed, he scrambled into yesterday’s robes and ran out the door. The meeting hadn’t quite started when he barrelled into the back room of the Coffin House, but Silviu was already up at the podium, engrossed in a silent conversation with Mr Moribund.

Harry took a seat at the edge of the room, next to the scarred man who was going to be married—Markus, had it been? The man waved and shot him a friendly smile, even though they had never formally met. Harry waved back hesitantly.

“All right, welcome everybody!” Silviu called out shortly thereafter, silencing the room. “Let’s get started. There’s a big announcement today, and a lot to be done. Here’s the agenda.”

Harry squinted as Silviu sent images through the bond, as if it would help him see them better. For some reason they were a little fragmented and blurry, like he was trying to read something without his glasses on.

“I’ll get right to the exciting part,” Silviu said, clapping his hands, and Harry braced himself for the announcement about the Dark Lord. “We have a new client as of last week. That’s why I delayed this meeting until we could get the details all ironed out. They are requesting a large quantity of rare potion ingredients. I cannot stress how important it is for us to meet this order with the utmost speed and quality. Our reputation as the best procurement company for magical paraphernalia in Britain depends upon it.”

Harry blinked, confused at how vague Silviu had been about just who the new client was. His breathing evened with some relief as the vampire continued to describe the basics of the deal without a single mention of the Dark Lord.

Shy went up after Silviu and began talking about market rates for this or that ingredient, and whether somebody in the company could produce or harvest certain things. Harry let this talk flow over his head, sure that it was irrelevant to him. Imminent disaster was averted, and he just had to wait to talk to Silviu after the meeting.

Everybody seemed to have the same idea as him, because there was a queue of about a dozen people trying to get a hold of Silviu’s attention. A little intimidated, Harry hung back as the chairman discussed candles and lacewing flies with a pair of skinny hags.

Reasoning that he didn’t want the exchange of blood to happen in public view, Harry let everybody else go before him. There were some, like Markus, who had only stayed behind to ask how they might help. Silviu waved them off, saying that he would let them know if there was something they could contribute. Others who were impacted by the “new client” took more time, asking for clarification on what they needed to do.

Finally, it was Harry’s turn. Silviu peered at him curiously. “Hello Harry, I appreciate your help with the potions, but as I said before, you don’t need to do anything for this.”

“I know,” Harry said. “It’s not about that, it’s more personal.” He glanced to Annette and Ness, who were discussing something in low tones in the other corner of the room.

“Let’s take this downstairs, then,” Silviu offered, heaving open the trap door to his flat. The creaking interrupted the ongoing conversation, drawing curious glances. Silviu gave a minute shake of his head and both board members immediately turned away. A little hesitantly, palming the ridges of the phial in his pocket, Harry preceded Silviu down the steps.

As soon as the door shut above him, leaving him in pitch darkness, he shut his eyes and spoke without turning to face Silviu. “I want to renew our bond.”

The click of footsteps on the staircase ceased. “Are you sure?” Silviu asked. “I would need to bite you again, and then you would have to drink my blood in return.”

“I’m sure,” Harry said.

“Not that I’m not very happy to hear this, Harry, but what brought this on?” Silviu asked.

Harry held his breath for a moment. “I think… we would be safer if we did,” he said. That was true, wasn’t it? They would both be safer when he finished his task for the Dark Lord.

“That’s true,” Silviu agreed, but he still sounded hesitant. “But there’s no immediate danger if we continue as we are now. I want you to be very certain—”

“Yes! I said I’m sure!” Harry insisted, irritation spiking. Did Silviu not trust him to know what he wanted? This sudden circumspection was excessive.

His annoyance vanished when Silviu murmured, “All right,” from a little too close by. Harry’s heart skipped a beat when he realised that the vampire had somehow crossed the distance between them silently and in an instant. Had he apparated? A cold hand dropped onto his shoulder and gave him a light push. Harry let himself be turned around.

Silviu’s eyes were two pinpricks of fire in the darkness, swooping down. Harry’s breath caught. He felt like somebody had jinxed him with the jelly-legs.

“Don’t. The thing with your eyes,” he said shakily, the vision of Nalrod’s death, so long ago now and yet so unforgettable, etched in his mind. The twin lights winked out, and Harry straightened up, staring blindly ahead. He could activate the night vision on his spectacles, but he thought it might be better not to see anything.

“It’ll hurt more, without the gaze,” Silviu warned.

“I don’t care,” Harry said. “No—no gaze.”

He didn’t really feel afraid, now that it was happening. He had asked for it, and Silviu was listening to him, was being ridiculously careful even. Cautious fingers touched the collar of his robe and Harry reached up to unbutton it and push it to the side along with his shirt. A hand came up to cradle his head, urging him gently to tilt it back, and another snaked around his waist, pulling him close. His heart thudded in anticipation.

Silviu’s cold cheek pressed against his, and Harry felt the strangeness before the pain, the sensation of something going into his flesh where it should not be. Then there was a sharp pinch that bloomed into an insistent burning. The fangs slid out of his throat almost as quickly as they had come, and cool lips soothed the pain for an instant before they pulled at the wound, sending a renewed ache radiating into his neck. Harry held his breath. He heard Silviu swallow, felt the grip around his waist tighten.

Another swallow. How much blood was the vampire going to take? Harry cursed himself for not discussing it beforehand, but before he could begin to worry in earnest Silviu released him, pulling away with a gasp.

Harry could smell his own blood, sharp and sour against the cool backdrop of stone and dust. He touched his throbbing neck. His hand came away wet. Had he expected otherwise? He licked at his fingers and pulled out his wand.

“ _Episkey,_ ” he muttered.

“No. It won’t work,” said Silviu. “Let it heal on its own.”

He heard a grunt of pain, and a distinct scent suddenly struck him. It was still blood, that much was plain, but there was a sort of sickly sweet quality to it that clung to the back of his throat. He tapped the knob on his spectacles and the small flat came into sharp relief. Silviu was down on one knee, his head coming up from his wrist, where blood welled up from two small puncture wounds.

Remembering the whole point of this exercise, Harry shoved his hand into his pocket and felt for the phial, cursing the extension charm for giving him that much more empty space to rummage about in.

“Wait,” he mumbled, as Silviu raised his arm. Harry was acutely aware that he was salivating, like he might at the scent of a freshly baked treacle tart at a Hogwarts feast. Finally, his fingers closed about his quarry. He took out the phial and thrust it at Silviu. “Can you put it in there?”

Thankfully, Silviu nodded and angled his wrist so that the blood dripped into the mouth of the phial. He did not hand it back until it was nearly full to the brim.

“Thanks,” said Harry and brought it unerringly to his lips, opening his mouth and tilting the glass back. Blood pooled on his tongue. He swallowed and observed the same finish that he had smelled, some lingering sweetness that warmed him from the inside like butterbeer. The world sharpened around him, not in acuity, but in the breadth of his perception, like he could suddenly take in more of the room than he could before. Details he had paid no mind to, such as the width of each book on the back shelf or the precise tessellating pattern of acacia leaves on the rug, leapt out to him insistently.

When the flow slowed, he had to force himself to tip the phial away and let the remaining droplets roll back down. He fumbled with the glass cork and then slipped the mostly empty container back into his pocket.

Silviu stood up, genuine concern written all over his face. “Are you all right? Lightheaded?” 

“I’m fine,” Harry said, shaking his head. His neck throbbed. Silviu darted across the room to the back shelf and retrieved a ruby-red potion from a rack.

“Blood-replenishing potion,” he said, pressing it into Harry’s palm.

“You barely drank anything,” Harry protested.

“More than you might think,” Silviu said, shaking his head. “Take it. There’s no reason not to.”

Harry drank the potion. It tasted like stale walnuts and left an unpleasant, scratchy feeling on his tongue. He made a face.

His shirt felt wet. “I’m still bleeding,” he noted. It seemed wasteful.

At the thought, his chest twisted with overpowering want, only an echo but still stronger than anything he had ever felt in his life. Simultaneously there was the oppressive vice grip of determination to thwart that very desire. Harry looked up. Silviu’s eyes gleamed red, not with the light of his gaze magic but ordinary emotion.

“Give it a few more minutes,” Silviu said in an admirably steady voice. “My saliva prevents clotting but it’ll will wear off on its own.”

“I don’t remember the friends bleeding this much,” Harry muttered.

“It’s that charm you cast. Sorry. I should have warned you beforehand that magic can aggravate the curse,” Silviu explained. He closed his eyes, but Harry could still feel his unabated hunger, raw and visceral.

He closed the short distance between them and tugged at Silviu’s robes. “No reason to let it go to waste,” he said.

Silviu let out a snarl that ended in a low hiss, decidedly inhuman, and his arms shot out as if to seize him, trembling as they came to a gentle stop on his shoulders. Harry stood stubbornly, refusing to back away. Silviu pressed his face to Harry’s collarbone and a cold, strangely rough tongue lifted the blood that had collected there.

As promised, he did stop bleeding after about five minutes, though his neck still hurt. Silviu helped clean the edges of his shirt with the siphoning charm. Harry supposed the blood-replenishing potion might have been necessary. As it was, he was perfectly fine, and  he felt a little silly for overthinking the whole thing before.

Silviu was looking at him wordlessly. By the by Harry felt some strange, shuddering warmth in his chest. It was fondness, he realised, but not his own. He basked in the foreign feeling for a long moment, closing his eyes and trying not to think of what he planned to do in the morning.

So Silviu did actually care about him. He didn’t know what to make of it, only that it felt nice.

“I… thanks,” Harry finally said, uncertain what he was thanking Silviu for. “I suppose you have things to do. I shouldn’t waste your time.”

“Not at all,” Silviu said. “You can stay here as long as you like. I can ask Annette to watch the shop, if you want to spend some time together. We could go on an outing, perhaps.”

“I’d like that,” Harry said, “another time, maybe. Tonight is a little sudden.”

Waves of hope and disappointment crested and crashed gently against the shore of his mind. Harry looked at Silviu and tried to think of how glad he was that somebody would care to spend time with him like that. He appreciated it. He did.

“Of course,” Silviu said, bowing his head. “Another time.”

Harry straightened himself out and took a hesitant step towards the stairs. Silviu hurried to ascend first so that he could lift up the heavy trap door. Annette and Ness had evidently finished their conversation; the back room was vacant and the excess furniture had all been pushed to one side and stacked haphazardly.

Silviu followed him out into the shopfront, where Annette was sitting at the counter. She stood up as they walked in and stepped out front, throwing on her cloak.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Silviu said, taking her place.

“No worries,” she said, holding open the front door. “Where are you headed, Harry?”

“Home,” he told her. “What about you?”

“Home as well,” she said, striding ahead.

“Oh. Where do you live?” Harry asked, as it suddenly occurred to him that he did not know. Annette looked at him strangely, slowing down.

“You’ve been to my house,” she said.

“What? No I haven’t,” he protested. Annette blinked at him, before understanding seemed to dawn on her.

“It’s the friends’ house,” she said, laughing when Harry’s mouth fell open in surprise. “You didn’t think we just let those children live on their own, did you?”

Harry sort of had. He shrugged. “So you take care of all of them?” he asked. “Like a mum?”

A strange expression flashed across Annette’s face for a moment, before she shook her head. “More like an older sister, really. How old do you think I am?”

Harry mumbled something under his breath, reluctant to guess. Annette laughed at him again.

“I’m only twenty-two,” she told him.

“Oh. Did you used to be a friend too?” Harry asked.

“Me? No. Back then the company was small, and they didn’t keep friends. At least, not for long,” she said.

Harry did not like the sound of that. “You mean, they killed them?” he asked.

Annette paused to frown at him. “Just muggles, yes.”

“What about now?” Harry demanded.

“Silviu likes to conserve them but accidents happen,” Annette said. “Only to the muggles of course. We keep blood-replenisher on hand for squibs.”

Harry was appalled on principle. That they were “just muggles,” seemed to be Annette’s justification, but Harry could make no sense of how that was relevant. “Blood-replenishment potion doesn’t work on muggles, then?” He swallowed thickly, the bitter aftertaste of the potion still coating his mouth.

“It poisons them,” Annette said, shrugging elegantly. “Muggles have weak constitutions. Some squibs too, if they’re especially mugglish. It’s too bad.”

She expressed this sentiment as one might lament over stormy weather. Harry supposed he couldn’t blame Silviu if he was trying his best, but something still seemed very wrong.

They walked in silence for a few minutes,  and  Harry waved goodbye as he split off at the graveyard. 

Exhaling, he palmed the phial in his pocket and hurried home, steeling his resolve. By this time tomorrow, Silviu would know nothing of Harry’s connection to the Dark Lord. It was for the best. And unlike Silviu, he wouldn’t botch it up. The vampire would never know that he had forgotten anything at all.


	41. Fateweaver

“Rosenkol was sailing in a teacup across the lake, when a great monster lifted it by the handle and launched it into the sky. Then Rosenkol was on the moon, which was made of cake,” Rosenkol reported dutifully.

“What colour was the teacup?” Harry asked.

“It was a very bright orange,” Rosenkol said, wrinkling his nose in distaste. Harry broke out into a grin.

“Thanks Rosenkol,” he said. The dream he had induced in the elf had played out just as he had imagined it for the third time in a row, and he felt he was ready to try visiting Silviu’s dream to change his fate.

He had only one chance to place the memory—he had to make sure to keep it sequential, whole, and at the forefront of his mind for the full duration of the spell. It would be different than the ordinary dream-induction charm, Petri had explained, when he was borrowing the power of the dead to plant information in dreams. He would not be adding, but replacing, overwriting. Knowledge from the beyond came at the price of corrupted memories, and the changing of fate sought to pervert and take advantage of that mechanism.

“Can you get Master Joachim?” Harry asked Rosenkol. The elf snapped his fingers and disappeared with a pop. Harry tapped his wand nervously against his knee and reviewed the false memory in his head. It was clear and unnaturally compact, coming to him easily after having been optimised by the pensieve’s enchantments. As Petri had promised, his mind did what the pensieve could not and smoothed out the jerky edges, leaving the scene whole and natural. Harry almost believed that it was the truth—he could barely recall what had actually happened.

Petri arrived after a minute and began to set up the pensieve. He produced Silviu’s blood, which had been transferred to a tiny, labelled vial, and siphoned the meagre contents into the basin.

“Go on,” Petri said.

Harry took a deep breath and pointed his wand at his arm. “ _Exhaurio_ ,” he muttered.  A  bead of red formed at his wand tip, quivering as it lengthened. His arm tingled. He pulled until he had a wobbling strand of blood.

“ _Locomotor liquoris._ ” Transitioning into the movement charm without dropping the blood was tricky, but he managed to catch it all in an unsteady sphere, which he directed to the pensieve. Carefully, he lowered the sphere onto the outer edge and allowed the blood to flow into the grooves of the external carvings.

Petri began casting to operate the pensieve, which glow ed with soft silver light. Heavy mist pooled in the basin, mixing with the blood to make a roiling, reddish soup.

When Petri lowered his wand, Harry stepped forward again and pointed his wand into the pensieve, moving the tip in a tight spiral. “ _Concipio,_ ” he cast.  T he red mist  swirled  in time with his wand. He repeated the spell under his breath and slowly, a humanoid figure began to coalesce. It lengthened and sharpened,  before  Harry  finally afforded it features from his memory—a pointed face, sunken eyes, and a prominent forehead. Grey-haired, as Silviu had been on that night, pale and hungry. The figure sunk into the basin, solid and silver like a memory.

Harry let out a shaky breath, lowering his wand momentarily. He had done it, brought Silviu’s impression into the pensieve. Now for the true challenge.

“ _Somniate!_ ” he incanted, wiggling his wand sinuously through the air like he had practised dozens of times that day, the image of that night clear in his mind, the texture of the bed, the raw confusion of waking to Silviu’s face, the _dream_ of the Dark Lord, just a dream, nothing more…

Harry plunged his face into the pensieve. He did not fall—he flew, launching himself through the mist with purpose. His heart raced, echoing with distant fear and pain. He heard screaming from afar. Darkness enveloped him, hot and smothering like wet cotton.

The night was cold and wet in contrast. There  was no moon, no stars , only clouds weeping thick, slow droplets. The lid of the pine coffin was smooth and dark with water. His heart did not beat;  it only quivered with an echo of distress. His fist met wood. Thunk, thunk. No response.

The screaming intensified somewhere in the back of his head. He drew his wand and pressed it to the door. The coffin rattled  before it  opened with a bang.  H e stared into its dark depths. Harry was thrashing on the bed—it was like nothing he had ever seen, a desperate, violent tangle of limbs. This was his child, suffering in his house. He ran inside. He reached out. Harry’s arms beat against him ineffectually. The boy’s eyes opened at last, glassy and unseeing. His head pulsed. Incomprehensible flashes came to  him—the smell of earth, a flickering fire, something inky black,  an agonised scream .

“Harry! Harry, wake up!” he shouted, panic seizing him as the boy continued to stare ahead. Harry was alive, he knew that, he could smell the blood pulsing in his veins and arteries. The boy’s eyes fluttered shut and then snapped open, aware this time.

“What are you doing here?”

He was relieved  and bemused all at once . Had he overreacted? Imagined the pain? “I felt your pain through our bond,” he said, searching for some confirmation in Harry’s eyes. He found only bewilderment. “I thought—well, what’s going on? Did you have a nightmare?”

Harry nodded. “Yeah.”

“You had a dream about the Dark Lord?” He received an indistinct impression of red eyes and fear and Lord Voldemort, Lord Voldemort, Lord Voldemort. The impressions vanished as Harry looked away.

“He’s back,” he said. “He was at Hogwarts.”

Harry reeled as he found himself back in the trunk, staring into the depths of the pensieve. He was breathing heavily.

“Well?” Petri asked, eyebrow raised.

“I think it worked,” Harry said, taking a moment to calm his racing heart. “I don’t know. It ended suddenly.”

“You were able to assume his form?” asked Petri. Harry nodded. “Then yes, it should have worked.” He approached the pensieve and flicked his wand at it. “Most of the blood has been consumed.”

Harry sagged in relief, noticing now just how tired he was. He had been up for almost twenty hours, and now that his task was done, the focus and energy  seemed to leave h im all at once.

“All right. I think I’d like to go to bed now,” he said.

“We can clean up tomorrow,” Petri agreed.

Harry felt ready to collapse on the spot, but managed to follow Petri back upstairs.

He didn’t remember getting into bed.  _Too early_ , he thought, blinking his eyes open blearily. It was pitch dark. There was a tap tap, tap tap coming from above. Tap tap.

Groaning he rolled his head to the side to try and hear if Petri was awake. Even breathing.

Tap tap, tap.

Harry closed his eyes again and waited. Nothing. The owl must have flown off.

He lay in bed for a solid five minutes before he finally acknowledged that he was not getting back to sleep and leapt out from under the covers, shivering at the sudden chill. Shrugging on his robes, he forewent socks and padded upstairs. As he nudged open the coffin lid, an envelope fell onto his head, momentarily obscuring his vision. He palmed it off his face and angled it under the sliver of white light. Still daytime. Definitely too early.

“Harry,” the letter said on the back in an elegant scrawl. He did not recognise the handwriting, and it wasn’t a dicta-quill script so it couldn’t be from Vince. Frowning, he slid his finger under the flap and extracted the stiff, high-quality parchment.

_Dear Harry,_

_You are invited to join me for a friendly racing match at my family’s manor on the morning of August 8_ _th_ _. I did, after all, promise to show you how a real broom flies, so naturally I will provide you with everything you will require. You need only bring yourself._

_Prepare for defeat, unless you are too cowardly to face me._

_Cordially,_

_Draco Malfoy_

_P.S. The floo address is ‘Malfoy Manor.’ You’ll be permitted in between nine and eleven._

Harry reread the letter just to check that he had not somehow hallucinated its contents. Draco Malfoy had just invited him to his house (excuse him,  _manor_ ) to race. They still barely knew each other. Did the blond ponce think that just because Harry had listened to him complain about his father’s expectations for five minutes, that they were friends now? He was tempted to refuse outright to spare himself a headache.

On the other hand, Draco was a crafty bugger, challenging him like that. Harry was no Gryffindor, but that didn’t mean he was going to let anybody get away with calling him a coward. Also, he was certain he could destroy Draco in a race any day, even against a Nimbus Two Thousand and One. He crumpled up the parchment in his hand with great effort.

There was rustling  from below  as well as  low grumbling. “What is it?” Petri asked, leaning up and shielding his eyes from the weak sunlight, as if he were a real vampire. Harry shut the coffin lid and felt his way down the stairs, casting a fire-making charm at the empty jar that he knew rested at the end of the banister. Warm blue flame trickled out of his wand, illuminating the room.

“Just a letter. A friend of mine invited me to his house on Saturday. May I go?” Harry asked Petri in his most casual tone. He didn’t think that mentioning Malfoy’s name would be a good idea.

“Fine,” said Petri dismissively, getting to his feet and throwing on a dressing gown.

“You’re on, Malfoy,” Harry scribbled on a spare bit of parchment, not bothering with any flowery niceties like ‘cordially.’ He wasn’t going in order to be cordial.

On  Saturday , Harry took a nap at two in the morning so that he would be fresh during the daylight hours. He decided to go at nine thirty, well within the stated window, as he had no desire to be blocked by the floo. Still suspecting the possibility of it all being some weird prank, he dropped his handful of floo powder cautiously into the public fireplace, stepped in, and shouted, “Malfoy Manor!”

The floo sucked him in as always, sending him careening past dozens of colourful foyers and lobbies before spitting him out face-first on a rich cream carpet. A disturbingly familiar cream carpet.

Harry pushed himself up and was confronted by the bulging green eyes of a house elf about two inches from his face. He scrambled to his feet with a yelp and tried in vain to dust some soot off  himself into the grate.

“Dobby will take care of it, sir,” said the elf, snapping his fingers and leaving Harry perfectly straightened out. Harry smiled appreciatively.

“Thanks, Dobby,” he said. His face fell as he looked around and confirmed his initial suspicion, tallying the evidence. Golden tapestries. Lavish rugs. Peacock statue by the floo. Well then.

This was the same drawing room where he had met the Dark Lord just a week ago, along with, now that he thought of it, Lucius Malfoy, who he was pretty sure had not yet worked himself back into the Dark Lord’s favour. His presence made much more sense now that Harry knew that this was Malfoy’s house.

“Young sir is thanking Dobby… Dobby has never…” the elf was muttering to himself in a tone of disbelief. Harry wondered if he had offended him somehow.

“Sorry,” he began, but then Dobby’s eyes grew as large as saucers.

“Young sir is apologising to Dobby, but kind sir has done nothing wrong,” he mumbled under his breath, though his word were fully audible.

“All right, could you let Draco know that I’m here?” Harry said quickly, before the elf could work himself into a further state.

“Young Master Draco, yes! Of course Dobby is to be announcing his friend! Bad Dobby!” the elf shrieked, and vanished with a loud pop. Harry stared at the spot he had vacated, bemused. He was beginning to think that all house elves were just a little bit mad.

While he waited, Harry took a better look around the ostentatiously decorated room. A window on the far side caught his eye. He ducked behind a row of high-backed chairs at a long table, circumvented the shadow of an enormous chandelier, and emerged at the edge of a sill flanked by a shimmering, lily-white drape embroidered with mesmerising patterns that vaguely resembled eyes.

One of the eyes blinked at him, and he jumped a foot in the air. Then a whole section of the pattern separated itself out, and Harry realised he was looking at an elegant white bird which was perched just on the other side of the glass. It cocked its head at him and stared for a moment before gliding down into the courtyard below. Harry peered after it and found more of its like wandering through carefully manicured gardens. The birds all had long, flowing tails—were they peacocks?

“Hello, Harry,” said somebody who was most certainly not Draco Malfoy. Harry’s heart leapt into his throat as he whirled around and came face to face with the Dark Lord. Before he could figure out what to do next, his hands came up reflexively to clutch at his scar, which had exploded in agony, as if somebody were driving a spike into it.

There was a rustle of fabric, and Harry saw the shadows between his fingers darken. Then the Dark Lord’s hands displaced his. Harry’s vision whited out with agony. He heard a distant scream. When he came to again, blinking, the world was sideways, and his still throbbing head was pressed up against something awkwardly.

He looked up and saw the Dark Lord’s waxy, red-eyed visage looming above him with some unreadable expression, and realised that he was leaning against the man. Desperately, he tried to right himself, but his limbs felt rubbery and he didn’t manage to move an inch. Something was… holding him? He tried to make sense of what was going on. Those were the Dark Lord’s arms.

“Does your scar still hurt?” the Dark Lord asked.

“Yes,” Harry gasped. As if it had been listening, his scar pulsed with a renewed wave of pain. The Dark Lord’s hand came up and a long finger pressed at his inflamed skin. Harry screamed again but did not pass out.

“The pain worsens when I touch it,” the Dark Lord observed. He then prodded Harry somewhere on his scalp, and when that elicited no particular response, slowly inched his finger closer to Harry’s forehead.

Harry grit his teeth and tried to breathe through his nose. Was the Dark Lord seriously experimenting? Seized by anxiety, he tried to wrench his head away, to no  avail—the Dark Lord drove his thumb into Harry’s scar, and it was as sharp as a needle. Harry blacked out another moment and woke up with tears streaming out of his eyes and fogging up his glasses.

“Stop snivelling,” said the Dark Lord. To his credit, he let go of Harry, who fell to the floor and scrambled to wipe his face on his sleeve as he tried to get back to his shaky feet.

“Sorry, sir,” he bit out, even though he thought he deserved to be receiving the apology rather than giving it.

“Stay there,” the Dark Lord ordered, and Harry reluctantly aborted his attempt to stand up. The Dark Lord took several measured steps backwards, regarding him curiously.

The pain seemed to abate ever-so-slightly with the increased distance, or perhaps it was just wishful thinking. Harry was about to report the effect when it reversed itself most unpleasantly. He moaned through his clenched teeth and collapsed to the floor entirely—it was unbearable now, comparable to the cruciatus except concentrated in his head.

“Interesting,” said the Dark Lord, though thankfully the interesting part ended momentarily as he said it. Harry took a gasping breath, desperate to recover the air he had eschewed while trying not to scream. He barely managed to take in one lungful before the pain was back. He yelped and almost bit his tongue.

“Get up,” the Dark Lord said now. Harry squeezed his eyes shut, focusing on untangling his limbs, rolling over, and operating his legs. As he did so, the stabbing pain receded to a dull ache. “Does it still hurt?”

“A little,” Harry said, panting. He wiped away the sheen of sweat that had collected on his brow and tried to straighten out his hair, which was all over the place, and smooth down his fringe. “What was that for?”

“Research,” said the Dark Lord unhelpfully. Harry could read nothing in his alien expression. 

“And what’s the conclusion? Sir?” Harry asked when nothing else was forthcoming. The Dark Lord narrowed his eyes.

“How is your progress on the task that I assigned you last week?” he asked, ignoring Harry’s question entirely.

“I’m done,” Harry said, a little petulantly. His head immediately swam in confusion as his thoughts fluttered off into a disjointed mush. Vaguely, he noticed that the pain in his scar was now gone entirely.

He saw Silviu’s face, in the flesh and in silver memory, and flashes of conversation echoed in his head—Petri’s lecture on the use of the  _somniate_ spell in necromancy, on the peculiar faculty of the dead to warp memories, on inferi.

The Dark Lord broke eye contact and Harry reeled, the pain in his scar flaring up with full intensity, now accompanied by throbbing in the rest of his head as his thoughts struggled to cohere themselves into their natural form.

“Harry,” said the Dark Lord, stretching out the first syllable and letting his high voice fall to a whisper on the second. Harry shuddered, his wits finally coming together to fuel a sinking feeling in his chest. The Dark Lord knew, had seen Petri, that Petri still knew.

“Harry,” the Dark Lord said again in a deep sigh. “My orders are not assignments for schoolchildren. I expect you to put in some modicum of thought, to obey in more than just the barest way… Did I not make myself clear that nobody should know of our connection? I confess myself disappointed.”

Harry braced himself, dread pooling in his gut.  _Don’t scream. Don’t scream_ , he thought, his eyes tracking the Dark Lord’s arm as he raised his wand, slowly and deliberately. Was it a mercy, to see it coming?

“ _Crucio!_ ”

He crumpled to the ground, unable to feel the impact past the stabbing of a thousand burning  needles sinking into his bones, setting them aflame.  He was bathing in molten glass. A high keening tore itself from his throat, muffled in its fight escape the prison of his teeth, which threatened to crack from the pressure of his clenched jaw. He tried to count seconds in his head but he had no sense of time, there was no room  for thought , no distraction from the agony.

Then it stopped—too soon, Harry thought deliriously, it couldn’t have been long. Not nearly twelve seconds, certainly. Where was he? Somehow he had ended up on his back. He lay there limply, cradled by the fluffy carpet, unable to will his body to move.

“Just a taste, a lesson. That hurt, didn’t it, Harry?” the Dark Lord asked softly.

It still hurt, actually, his forehead. He almost hadn’t noticed it in the devastating wake of the cruciatus.

“Yes,” Harry croaked, when the silence stretched too long and the pain in his scar pulsed in warning.

“You don’t want me to do that again, do you?” asked the Dark Lord, and _what kind of question was that?_

Harry forced himself to roll over and push himself to his knees so that he could peer up at the Dark Lord. His whole body was trembling and he felt on the verge of choking with every breath. He inhaled through his nose and stared into unreadable red eyes.

“No, I don’t,” he murmured, his voice surprisingly clear. He really hadn’t screamed, had he? Not quite. “But what I want doesn’t matter. I understand… My Lord.”

The Dark Lord’s eyes crinkled. Harry had hoped  that calling him by his title would appease him. For a moment, he wondered if he had said the wrong thing, but then the pale wand disappeared.

“You are mistaken,” said the Dark Lord, stepping closer and gesturing for Harry to stand up. He placed a spidery hand on Harry’s shoulder, as if to steady him, though it felt more like a trap closing in. “What you want is not unimportant. _Quid pro quo,_ Harry, I will give you what you want if you give me what I want. I am not an unreasonable man. Perhaps I was too harsh with you… you are only a boy. It is perfectly understandable that you would turn to your master for help when faced with such a difficult task.”

Harry knew what he was doing—painting himself sympathetic, as if he regretted his actions. He was certain that the only thing the Dark Lord truly regretted was not finding it prudent to prolong the cruciatus curse another moment, perhaps more. Harry had not forgotten what it had felt like inside Lord Voldemort’s head. He understood, with more clarity than he had had in a long time.

“It’s all right,” Harry said. “I’ll do better next time.”

The Dark Lord smiled. Harry’s  already-racing  heart sped up at the unnerving sight.

“You will,” he agreed. “I shall make sure of it. But first, the reason why I called you here.”

Harry blinked. That was right—he had been so distracted by the painful experience of being in the Dark Lord’s presence that the strangeness of the situation had completely escaped him. That letter from ‘Draco’ had essentially been bait. But how had the Dark Lord known just how to get him to come?

No; that was silly, Harry realised. An imperius curse would have done nicely in getting Draco to do exactly what was necessary to summon Harry to his home. Had their meeting in Diagon Alley been planned, as well?  No.  That was unlikely. Harry had gone there on a whim.

“Your occlumency lessons,” the Dark Lord said, interrupting his spiralling speculation. “I have arranged a teacher, as I promised.”

“Oh. Thank you, My Lord,” Harry said, unable to keep himself from lowering his head a little, as if to bow. If there was something magical to names, he thought, then there must be something to titles as well. It could be no accident that the Dark Lord styled himself as he did.

“As your mind holds sensitive information of mine, I will personally be removing his memories after each of your sessions. I hope you will not waste my time by failing to be diligent,” the Dark Lord explained.

Removing the teacher’s memories? Harry supposed that meant that his teacher would be using legilimency on him, which made sense, but did not ease his trepidation. Occlumency probably was not easy—if it were, Harry could not imagine why anybody would leave themselves vulnerable to would-be mind readers. Would he be able to master it to the Dark Lord’s satisfaction in time?

There was no choice. He would have to. “No, My Lord. I’ll do my best.”

“He will arrive at eleven. Until then, I am sure the Malfoys will be pleased to entertain you,” said the Dark Lord, a faint smirk playing at his lips.

He disapparated on the spot without so much as turning on his heel.

Harry stared ahead unseeingly for about a minute before he managed to unfreeze and try to straighten out his robes, which had got rather rumpled from all his rolling on the floor. He reviewed the conversation with the Dark Lord in his head and decided that all in all, it had been a favourable one, cruciatus curse or not.

The door to the drawing room clicked open, and Lucius Malfoy entered, looking very pale. Draco was nowhere in sight. Harry felt distinctly like he was trespassing.

“Mr Potter,” said Malfoy stiffly, “Are you all right?” This was a strange question coming from Lucius Malfoy.

“I’m fine, Mr Malfoy,” Harry said, unsuccessfully trying to hide his confusion. His face had already settled into a frown without his leave.

“The Dark Lord. Did he… did he hurt you?” Malfoy asked. He sounded concerned. Not for Harry, certainly, but about something. Harry studied his face and finally pinpointed what was behind that pinched expression—fear.

Had he heard Harry’s not-quite-screams through the door? Perhaps he was afraid that the Dark Lord was angry and would cruciate him next upon his return.

Harry shrugged. “The cruciatus curse. Nothing unusual,” he said. He was sure Malfoy knew that it was, unfortunately, one of the Dark Lord’s favourite curses.

Malfoy blanched even more at that,  apparently at a loss for words.

“Mr Malfoy, if you don’t mind me asking, where’s Draco?” Harry asked. “He invited me to broom race with him. You were expecting me, right?”

There was a long silence. Then, Malfoy said suddenly, eyes fixing intently on Harry’s face, “Draco doesn’t know. About the Dark Lord.”

“I won’t say anything,” Harry promised, understanding with a sudden surge of resentment that Malfoy was terrified for his son and was trying to protect him. Surprised by the bitterness that threatened to choke him, he had to look away. 

So Draco had a family that loved him. Where did that leave him?  As leverage. Harry swallowed, working to reason away his envy. It was all becoming clear—the Dark Lord had Lucius Malfoy mercilessly pinned by his weak point. It didn’t matter how powerful a wizard Malfoy was when the Dark Lord could have Draco screaming under his wand at the slightest misstep. If Malfoy had somehow clung to the naive hope that the Dark Lord was above torturing children, that misconception had now definitively been put to rest.

Malfoy nodded and gestured with his cane for Harry to follow him out the closest door, which opened into a wide, torchlit corridor lined on both sides with gilt-framed portraits of pasty blond witches and wizards, no doubt Malfoy ancestors. They were all painted against austere, almost monochrome backgrounds and stood stiffly in elaborate dress robes, sneering down at passersby.

At the end of the corridor was a set of arched double doors in polished, dark wood. Malfoy tapped his cane lightly against them and they flew open, allowing the morning sunlight to stream inside. It was a beautiful day, cloudless and perfectly temperate. Harry wondered if there were atmospheric charms at work—London had certainly been exhibiting its usual dreary countenance when he had left.

They exited onto a generous veranda with a low railing and heavy support beams, which cast thick shadows against the white floorboards. There seemed to be no clear end to the Malfoy property—beyond the veranda, pleasantly green fields stretched on for many acres until they bumped up against the edges of a distant forest.

Mr Malfoy stopped just shy of the grass and peered up at the sky, his hand coming up to shade his face. Harry followed his gaze and quickly spotted a colourful form zooming up the field. Draco on a broomstick, no doubt. When the figure failed to approach them for landing, Mr Malfoy separated the end of his cane from the rest, revealing a dark wand, and pointed it up in the air, sending out a burst of white sparks with a loud bang.

This display caught Draco’s attention, and he circled around in the air, descending rapidly.

“Father, Harry, hello,” he greeted as he touched down, somehow without a single hair out of place. He shouldered his broom, black and shiny and unmistakably the Nimbus Two Thousand and One, smirking at Harry.

“Finally here, are you? Come on, I’ll show you to the broom shed,” Draco said, ushering Harry along the outside of the veranda and leaving his father behind. He was pink in the face from the wind and obviously in high spirits. Harry tamped down on his resentment and tried to think about flying.

It worked. A grin spread unbidden across his face when he imagined the imminent freedom of careening through the air with nothing to stop him. It would be even better when he wiped that smirk off Draco’s smug mouth.

The Malfoy broom shed rivalled or perhaps even surpassed Hogwarts’, given its much superior state of repair. A dozen sleek brooms in various shapes and shades were lined up on heavy wood and metal racks and kept in a dry, temperature-controlled environment. Unlike the school brooms, none of these had a twig out of place.

“Those are the long-distance and antique brooms. They’re slow,” Draco said, waving dismissively to the right side of the spacious shed. He pointed to the other wall. “My old Comet Two Sixty is probably the best one of the lot, but you can use any of these.”

Harry passed his hand across each of the brooms on the left side. He saw a Cleansweep Seven, as well as earlier Cleansweep and Comet models. He eventually decided on the Comet Two Sixty, as recommended.

“Up!” he commanded, holding his hand out, and it sprang into his grip eagerly. He shouldered it and nodded to Draco.

“Go for a warm up round,” Draco said graciously, gesturing to the sky as they exited the shed. “Just don’t go past the tree line.” Harry threw his leg over the broom, felt the cushioning charms engage, and lifted off with a firm kick, shooting into the air.

The school brooms really were rubbish. Harry instantly felt the difference in manoeuvrability and control on the Comet—it responded to the slightest shift in grip pressure and required no compensation or correction on the dive to prevent listing. He easily hit his old top speed with no sign of stress or vibration, laughing uproariously against the wind as he barrelled through the open air.

Tugging on the handle, he made a hairpin turn in half a second and flew sideways with one arm dangling off the broom, just because he could, then dove straight for the ground, leaping off to land as  he usually did . He held up a hand to summon the broom back to him,  shaking his messy fringe out of his eyes. How did Draco manage to keep his hair in place after flying, anyway?

“Hope you’re ready to eat the dust,” said Draco, mounting his broom. “Three laps around.”

“In your dreams, Malfoy,” Harry said.

“Three, two, one!” Draco shot off like a dirty little cheater. Harry let him get his lead. It was clear even from that split second that the Nimbus Two Thousand and One had faster acceleration than the Comet Two Sixty, but Harry knew his way around much shoddier broomsticks.

Climbing high and allowing Draco to move ever farther from him, he reached the zenith of his ascent, slowly picking up speed from the acceleration charm, before he dove, aiming just ahead of Draco’s blurred form.

Gravity did its work and brought him hurtling past the other boy. He pulled upwards again before he crashed into the ground and did a corkscrew, buying himself an extra bit of speed.  As soon as it was safe to do so, he dropped his elevation again. Draco was a bit above him now, but they were neck and neck on the course. Harry had chosen this spot strategically so that Draco would be hard-pressed to do a proper dive—he had picked up a few things from Marcus Flint, who, despite looking like the offspring of a troll and a brick wall, was the nimblest and most strategic  flyer at Hogwarts.

Draco tried to ascend and lost a little bit of speed, falling back. Harry, rather than pressing his advantage, copied his opponent, forcing him higher and higher. Here the Nimbus again proved the superiority of its design—Draco managed to rise just a tad more quickly. Abandoning his strategy before it backfired on him, Harry pressed himself to his broom handle and shot ahead, glancing behind him and counting the seconds. There—Draco dove, determined to catch up, and Harry pulled upwards sharply, right into his path. He grinned as Draco panicked and swerved instinctively, losing speed, and Harry surged ahead, confident in his new lead.

“Bloody hell,” said Draco as he touched down by the broom shed, a full three seconds later than Harry, “You fly dirty.”

“High praise from a Slytherin,” Harry said, smirking. Draco scoffed.

“I know your tricks now. Again,” he said. Harry paused to check the time. Half past ten. He nodded, but Draco asked, “How long are you staying?”

“I’ve got a lesson with a… tutor at eleven,” Harry said. Draco accepted this without question and gestured for Harry to get ready. They mounted their brooms and kicked off once more on three.

Harry, still grinning to himself, tried out some new tricks this time, like tailing Draco so closely he could have reached out to touch the Nimbus’s bristles so that Draco couldn’t ascend for fear of a crash, and then doing a close dive to outstrip him at the last second. He won again. Draco was scowling petulantly now.

“Let’s just race straight,” he said, trying and failing to sound casual. Harry shrugged.

“Sure,” he agreed. Straight flying was boring, more like an enchanter’s competition on who had crafted the better acceleration and shielding charms, but Harry hadn’t forgotten growing up with Dudley, and he knew how to deflect spoilt brats.

Naturally, Draco won that race, though he didn’t look too happy about it. Harry pretended to be very grateful for the opportunity to try a better broomstick. It wasn’t all show—he had certainly had great fun flying. They said their goodbyes out on the veranda, as Draco was not finished with his practice, and Harry retraced his steps to the drawing room, where he checked the time again and sat down on an uncomfortable armchair facing the fireplace to wait. It was five to eleven.

At eleven on the dot, the floo flared green and a blond figure clad in dark blue robes spun out, dusting himself off with his wand pinched between his fingers. Harry was surprised to recognise him—it was Barty.

Barty grinned at the sight of him. “Hello, Harry.”

“Oh, hello Barty. Are you here to teach me occlumency?” Harry asked, getting to his feet.

“I am indeed. Come on, take my arm and we’ll get out of this stuffy place. The right one, mind you,” Barty said, extending his wand arm slightly awkwardly. Harry clutched it with both hands, bracing himself for side-along apparition.

They appeared on the front porch of Barty’s house, and Harry gasped for air as Barty unlocked the door.

“You want something to drink?” he asked as he led them to the parlour.

“No, I’m all right, thanks,” Harry said.

“Ready to get started then?” said Barty, and Harry nodded. “Here, sit on the couch. You probably don’t want to be standing for this.”

Harry sat, and Barty settled across from him. “So, tell me what you know about occlumency.”

“Not much,” Harry said. “It’s the counter to legilimency—that’s about all I know.”

Barty nodded. “It’s probably not like any other magic you’ve ever done. For one, it’s wandless, and it’s also all in your head.” He tapped the side of his head. “There’s also no way to tell if your occlumency is working until a legilimens attacks you. That’s what I’m here for.”

“So what do I do?” Harry asked, when Barty paused for a long moment.

“I’m getting there,” Barty said, laughing. “Trying to think. It’s not like a spell where there’s just one way to do it. What you’re really doing is beating the legilimens at his own game. So it depends on what the legilimens is looking for and what your goal is. Maybe we can start with the most straightforward case—you’re attacked with legilimency and you want to block the spell, stop the attacker from finding any of your thoughts. What you’re going to have to do is not think.”

“Not think,” Harry repeated, blinking.

“The legilimens can’t find your thoughts if there are no thoughts to find,” Barty said, nodding sagely. “Try it out and then I’ll test your defences.”

Harry sat still and tried to stare off into space. But he wasn’t really not thinking… there he was, second-guessing himself—he was still confused.

“ _Legilimens!_ ” Barty said, raising his wand and staring into Harry’s eyes.

Harry felt like he was falling into a cornflower-blue kaleidoscope. Seemingly random thoughts began flitting about in his head before coalescing into some relevant but still disorderly bundle—the Dark Lord’s striking visage showed up prominently, and then the echo of pain, a flash of the white wand, a high voice saying, “ _Crucio_ !”

The spell broke. Harry blinked rapidly and Barty was laughing, for some reason.

“Try to stop me, come on,” he cajoled. “Don’t think. Don’t feel, either. Any thought you have is a weakness, a way for the legilimens to break into your head.”

He cast the spell again, and Harry failed immediately, still confused. What was not thinking supposed to be like? His mind darted to something else he was confused about—Silviu. The friends. The ashy, nutty taste of the blood-replenishing potion. The taste of blood. That was private, Harry thought for a moment, but that only made his thoughts race faster. He tried to wrench the stream toward something else, anything else, and it fell on inferi instead—the smashed teacup, Ulrich, gobstones, Ulrich’s horrified face, the horcrux—

“NO!” Harry screamed, and resurfaced from his dreamlike thoughts with a bang. His wand was in his hand somehow, fizzing sparks, and his heart was pounding. Barty was laughing again, a little singed. He straightened himself out with a wave of his wand.

“Wow. You’re not supposed to attack me,” he said, though he didn’t seem displeased, as he was grinning. “Don’t get too worked up. It’s easier to get into your head when you’re emotional, especially when you’re angry or really excited. You’ve got to stay calm, and stop thinking. I don’t know how to explain it beyond that. I suppose you have to keep practising until you get it.” He cast the spell again.

Harry tried to lose focus and hang in a sort of blank state, like the one he sometimes found himself in just before falling asleep. Unfortunately, this had the effect of making him think of sleep, which quickly transitioned to coffins, the Coffin House, Silviu’s coffin and how uncomfortable it looked… he scrunched up his nose and tried to focus on the thought of Silviu’s flat, his acacia-leaf carpet in its garish colours, obscured in the darkness—but the thought dissolved, forcibly turned to the carpet in Malfoy’s drawing room, to the Dark Lord…

They spent the rest of the hour like this, Barty attacking him repeatedly, mercilessly digging into sensitive secrets. Harry felt hollowed, laid bare, but at the same time the experience had been strangely cathartic. Barty had made no comment at all on what he had seen, only continued to criticise his technique, which led to marginal improvement but still nothing worthwhile.

After the twelfth time revisiting the thought of the Dark Lord casting the cruciatus curse—the strange impossibility of capturing the pain in memory, the shape of his fingers on the pale wand, the faint curl of his lipless mouth and the crinkle of his eyes, the hiss in his voice—in short, every possible aspect of the wizard in that moment, Barty said, “You don’t think when you’re being cruciated.”

Harry stilled, not at all liking the direction that this was going.

Barty laughed. “I’m not going to cast it on you. I just meant, you’re so focused on the pain, there’s no room for anything else. It’s sort of nice.”

Harry stared at him incredulously. Had he just called the cruciatus curse  nice? Barty was officially, certifiably mad. The man gave him a crooked smile.

“It’s that moment right after, especially,” he said. “You know, whenever I bring that memory up you’re almost throwing me out. If you could hold that mindset for just a bit longer, I think you could get it.”

Harry considered it. Normally he did not like thinking about the cruciatus curse, for obvious reasons, but on the other hand, the memory itself did not  really  hurt. In fact, he found it impossible to even conceptualise that level of pain, despite having experienced it multiple times. And what had it been like, afterwards? A frozen moment full of agonising  echoes and unparalleled relief all at once. Harry sighed.

“I’ll keep that in mind for the next time I get cruciated,” he said, half jokingly.

Barty closed his eyes. “Ah, but the cruciatus means you’ve disappointed Master—that’s always the worst part,” he said, bowing his head.

Harry winced. “It might be inevitable… I don’t know if I can get occlumency down by the end of the summer, at this rate.”

“He must only mean for you to grasp the basics,” Barty said. “I’m sure you’ll be able to stop thinking for long enough to keep out someone who’s just trying to snoop, soon enough. Learning to resist interrogation, or to lie to a legilimens—that would take years, minimum.”

“Oh,” said Harry, feeling marginally better. Still, he wouldn’t put it past the Dark Lord to expect something impossible out of him.

Barty gave him a reassuring smile. “The Dark Lord expects your best, and he will challenge you to your limits, but he wouldn’t give you a task if he thought you couldn’t accomplish it. Have faith in him and in yourself.”

“Thanks,” Harry said.

“Besides, it’s on me as well, as your teacher, to make sure you’re where you need to be,” Barty said. “And I don’t intend to fail my master. Anyway, I think we’ve got far enough along today. Keep practising not thinking, maybe every night just before bed, and I’ll see you here next week. Same time.”

“Where is here, exactly?” Harry asked. “Is there a floo address?”

“It’ll be complicated to let you come in by floo,” Barty said, shaking his head. “You can call my house elf, Winky, and she’ll bring you.”

“All right. I can leave by floo though, right?” said Harry.

“Wait, not yet. Master said to summon him when we were finished. I don’t think I saw anything I shouldn’t have, but that will be for him to decide,” Barty said.

Harry tried to remember what Barty might have brought up. Though he had skirted dangerously close to the matter of the horcrux that one time, most of the rest of the session had largely touched on Silviu and some superficial thoughts of the Dark Lord, as well as Harry’s friends at Hogwarts. Nothing too incriminating.

“What’s it like, anyway? Doing legilimency?” Harry asked as Barty rolled up his sleeve.

“Pretty vague, to be honest,” Barty said. “The deeper you try to go, the worse it is. Everything you see is wildly out of context. And I was trying not to hurt you too much, so I was jumping through your thoughts instead of forcing you to stay on one topic.”

“Oh. Thanks,” said Harry. “It’s normally wandless, right? Is it easier with a wand?”

“Ha!” said Barty, “Believe it or not, it’s the opposite. Legilimency is more forceful with a wand, but it’s harder to get right. The magic still has to come from your eyes, you see.”

He pressed his forefinger to the pale scar on his forearm. It immediately flared black, and he hissed through gritted teeth. Despite the apparent pain it caused, he kept his finger firmly pressed to his skin for a long while, longer, Harry was sure, than was strictly necessary.

“Come on,” Barty said, lowering his arm and hurrying to the front door. He threw it open, waiting eagerly at the threshold.

It took about five minutes for the Dark Lord to arrive, during which Barty did not so much as twitch, still frozen in anticipation. The Dark Lord apparated soundlessly onto the front step, simply there one moment with no warning at all.

Harry’s scar twinged, but it did not escalate to a debilitating pain, and remained only a nuisance. He wondered if the Dark Lord was doing something to affect its reaction to his presence.

Barty threw himself to his knees and kissed the hem of the Dark Lord’s robes reverently. Harry felt awkward, as if he were somehow being impolite by not immediately prostrating himself in greeting, which was ridiculous.

“Master, please come in,” said Barty, pivoting onto his feet and bowing the Dark Lord through the door.

“How was the lesson, Barty?” the Dark Lord asked.

“I think Harry is on the right track, Master. He hasn’t pushed me out yet, but he can put up some resistance to guidance,” Barty reported.

“Good. Let me see,” said the Dark Lord, and Barty raised his head to meet his eyes. The Dark Lord reached out with one spidery hand and held Barty’s chin firmly, raising his wand with the other and putting it to his temple. Barty whimpered faintly, and silvery liquid began to seep from the corners of his eyes, like tears. They were memories, Harry realised. They dripped slowly down his face and dissipated into mist before they could reach his chin.

When the Dark Lord released him, Barty sank to his knees, gasping.

“Interesting,” said the Dark Lord, turning to Harry, who had a moment to feel worried as he saw the wand rising in a familiar arc. “ _Crucio!_ ”

Harry dropped to the floor instinctively, though he was close enough that the curse struck him anyway—perhaps that was for the better, as dodging the Dark Lord’s spell might have been grounds for offence. His vision lost focus for a moment as he struck the ground and he screamed louder than he ever had, wholly unprepared, but he did not lose consciousness even for a second. Indeed, no matter how bad it was, the cruciatus never threatened to make him black out, wasn’t that curious…

This thought slipped away, drowned in a sea of unbearable pain.

The curse ended. Harry blinked, disorientated—he realised he was moving upwards, somehow—a giant hand seemed to have grasped him and was pulling him to his feet. The Dark Lord, who had closed the distance between them in the meantime, reached out and tilted Harry’s head up. He felt an awful pressure in his head, just behind his eyes.

“Unorthodox, but it works,” said the Dark Lord, and Harry saw himself for a moment, somehow, dishevelled and with a slack face, and sharp amusement fluttered through him. Then he was back in his own body, knees and elbows aching from their recent acquaintance with the hard floor.

His scar burned and then cooled suddenly, as if doused with water. Thoughts of the lesson he had just had flitted to his mind—his confusion about how to think about nothing, his worries of being unable to grasp occlumency quickly enough, Barty’s suggestion about the cruciatus curse…

Harry’s thoughts froze, and then slid into realisation. He blamed Barty for this.

“It didn’t work,” Harry protested. The Dark Lord was in his head right this moment.

“I told you Harry, that you will never be able to occlude against me. We share a connection, as I am sure you’ve realised. It comes with its advantages and drawbacks,” the Dark Lord said. “However, it does seem that you would have repelled an ordinary legilimency attack. Interesting, is it not?”

Harry wasn’t sure how to answer this question, primarily interested as he was in avoiding another round of the cruciatus curse.

“Come now,” said the Dark Lord, lowering his voice almost conspiratorially, “Are you not happy to have discovered something new? We might be the first to ever confirm this particular effect.”

“Yes, My Lord,” Harry said, almost meaning it. The Dark Lord had a point—Harry just wished he hadn’t been the unlucky test subject.

“I appreciate you indulging my curiosity,” said the Dark Lord charitably. “Ah, but Barty deserves credit too. This hypothesis of yours, Barty—what inspired it?”

“Master, it was the Longbottoms,” said Barty. Harry glanced up, bemused. Neville’s family? “We went there, looking for information on what they’d… if they’d done something. Bella just thought they were talented occlumens. She—you know how she is, Master, she cruciated them, but we couldn’t get a single thing from them. I didn’t think of it at the time, but later, I wondered if maybe it was something else.”

“Very good, Barty. You always do ask the right questions,” said the Dark Lord, nodding. “Now, Harry, one last thing. Your master cannot be permitted to continue knowing about our connection. I would ask that you complete your task properly.”

“How? I can’t cast the memory charm,” Harry said. He had seen this order coming, but that did not mean he had a solution in mind. Obliviating Petri sounded next to impossible.

“I am aware,” said the Dark Lord. “Worry not. Lord Voldemort will provide you the means. You can cast the imperius curse, correct?”

Harry nodded, not seeing where this was going. Surely he could not imperius Silviu—the vampire would definitely see it coming, and how would he explain it afterwards? People did not just conveniently forget who had cast it on them and what they had done under its influence.

“As you may infer, Hogwarts will be getting a new Defence Against the Dark Arts professor this coming fall. I have been informed that there has only been one applicant for the position thus far—a man named Gilderoy Lockhart.”

Barty made a choked sound, mouth hanging open in disbelief.

“I understand he is a minor celebrity,” said the Dark Lord, raising a hairless brow at Barty.

“Went to Hogwarts with him,” Barty mumbled. “Bloody peacock.”

“As it happens, he is proficient at memory charms, and I aim to have him placed under the imperius curse anyway. A happy coincidence.” said the Dark Lord. Harry nodded slowly, swallowing his questions and concerns as it was evident that the Dark Lord was about to continue. “He will appear at Flourish and Blotts for a book signing on the nineteenth. Lucius will provide a distraction, and you will cast the imperius. An elegant solution, yes?”

“Yes, My Lord,” Harry agreed, understanding that he had been given a very generous second chance.


	42. Ally

The nineteenth of August was a Wednesday, which Harry thought was an odd day to be having a book signing. Still, he confirmed the date and time in advance with the shopkeeper at Flourish and Blotts, who was more than happy to tell him all about Lockhart and to extol the virtues of his many writings. Harry purchased _Voyages with Vampires,_ which cost an entire galleon, cringing internally the entire time as the shop witch rang him up and shrank his purchase, still prattling on about Lockhart and his award-winning smile.

“This one’s one of my favourites,” she gushed, caressing the cover, on which a glossy image of a fair-haired man grinned with dazzlingly white teeth as he looked out from the prow of a steamship. “I don’t want to spoil the ending, but Gilderoy Lockhart’s really something. The way he dealt with that ghastly vampire…”

Harry glanced sceptically at Lockhart’s perfectly coiffed hair as the book shrank down to the size of a matchbox.

“Thanks,” he muttered to the shopkeeper, pocketing his dubious prize and hurrying back home.

If Lockhart really was the expert slayer of dark creatures that his books suggested he was, how was Harry supposed to get the jump on him anyway? He twirled his wand in his hand before stilling it forcibly, realising that he seemed to have somehow acquired one of the Dark Lord’s mannerisms.

Sighing, he settled on his bed and pulled out his tiny new book, unshrinking it with a tap of his wand. The Lockhart on the cover winked at him and tossed his golden hair. Harry wrinkled his nose and opened up the stiff volume.

 _Voyages with Vampires_ read like a novel, though the insert claimed that it was a memoir. The story took place on a transatlantic cruise ship, at first glance entirely muggle, where the intrepid Lockhart had decided to spend an extended holiday in the lap of luxury. Alas, just days into the voyage, the unthinkable happened—one of the passengers, a young woman, was found dead in her cabin! Hoping to help the investigation with his not inconsiderable powers, Lockhart eavesdropped on the muggle authorities and discovered that the woman had died of blood loss, but that no blood had been found anywhere outside of her body. The muggles were confounded. An expert on dark creatures, Lockhart immediately suspected a vampire, and went on the hunt.

Harry frowned. It was awfully reckless of the vampire to leave bodies behind. He or she could have thrown the body overboard, or even refrained from killing by visiting multiple victims, the way Silviu did. The culprit had even been so brazen as to repeat the same pattern, killing another two young women in the ensuing days.

With so many passengers on board the ship, Lockhart had apparently been hard-pressed to track down the vampire’s whereabouts. Worse yet, after the third day, one of the victims rose from the dead as a zombie. She didn’t understand what had happened to her and began wandering about the ship, searching for her family. It was apparently against international wizarding law to kill zombies (and vampires) without their express consent, so Lockhart had to chase her all around the ship trying to explain her situation to her, as her strength was too much for his incarcerous.

At this point, Harry dog-eared the page and reached under his bed blindly for his textbooks until he found the thin spine of _Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them._ He flipped to the back and frowned. Zombies weren’t listed at all.

Irritated, he returned to Lockhart’s book, trying to glean the relevant information from context. It seemed like a zombie was sort of like a vampire, as a corpse reanimated through a natural curse (the same curse?) but a zombie was driven to consume all sorts of life, not only blood, and did not have any active magical abilities. From the events as described, Harry figured that there was a random chance that somebody killed by a vampire would become a zombie rather than stay dead. Neither Petri nor Silviu had ever mentioned this possibility to him at all, leading Harry to assume that it was either different for wizards, or precluded by the two-way exchange of blood.

Despite the overly dramatic prose, Harry came away from _Voyages with Vampires_ with a healthy respect for Lockhart’s ingenuity. In the end, he had calmed the zombie girl and interviewed her for a description of the man she had invited into her cabin—when entering a dwelling, however temporary, for the first time, vampires always required an invitation, something which Harry had not known. Guessing that the vampire would be out and about in the evening, looking for somebody to trick into allowing him admittance, Lockhart used his charms skills to disguise himself as a fair maiden. This strategy did not work right away, and the vampire was able to claim another victim, but in the end Lockhart found him, duped him into entering his cabin, and overpowered him with a combination of the sunlight charm and a conjuration of wild roses. Then he cast a curse on the vampire to make him vomit up any blood that he drank, but in his enthusiasm overpowered it, with the result that the vampire could eat nothing but lettuce.

Harry had so many questions about the book. He sprang them upon Petri the moment the man arrived home.

“What are zombies, and why aren’t they in my textbook?” Harry asked without preamble. Petri blinked at him in bemusement.

“Zombies are not found in Europe,” he said. “I don’t know much about them, beyond that they’re a sort of living dead, less threatening than a vampire and less useful than an inferius. What have you been reading?”

Somewhat guiltily, Harry held up his new book. A grimace of disgust stretched Petri’s face at the sight of the cover.

“What is _that_?” Petri demanded.

Harry gave the weak excuse that the shopkeeper had pressured him into buying it, at which Petri scoffed. “It’s supposed to be all true,” Harry added defensively. “But at the end he curses a vampire to eat nothing but lettuce, or he’d vomit. Is that actually possible?”

Petri snorted. “Probably. There’s a whole class of curses and hexes that cause vomiting under this or that circumstance. Still, that looks exactly like the sort of book one should judge by its cover.”

Harry’s purchase was vindicated Wednesday afternoon when his book list for Hogwarts arrived, comprising seven of Lockhart’s books, including _Voyages with Vampires._ Unfortunately, the book list was hand-delivered by Headmaster Dumbledore himself. Harry cursed his luck as Dumbledore invited himself inside, sat down at the table, and conjured up a tea set. Lockhart’s book signing was starting imminently, and Harry had planned on arriving early.

“Joachim, I’m afraid this is no mere social call. I have a request for you,” Dumbledore told Petri.

“I expected nothing different,” said Petri, inclining his head. “What is it?”

“I would ask that you reveal Harry’s identity to me. I had believed that he would be safe in anonymity, but alas, recent events have proven me wrong. Has Harry told you of what happened at the end of term?” Dumbledore asked.

“The Dark Lord was at Hogwarts, possessing first a professor, and then Harry himself,” Petri summarised without affect. “Nonetheless, what you are asking is not my secret to tell.”

“Then I would ask that you pass on my request,” said Dumbledore. Petri glanced to Harry and beckoned for him to take a seat the table.

“Well?” he said.

Harry gaped. Petri was really going to let him decide? He peered at Dumbledore out of the corner of his eye, but the man was ignoring him studiously.

“I don’t know,” Harry mumbled. He really did not. On the one hand, Dumbledore was obviously an enemy of the Dark Lord, with whom Harry had already committed to an uneasy truce that he did not want to shake. On the other hand, _Dumbledore was an enemy of the Dark Lord_ , and to rebuff him would be to firmly place himself on the Dark Lord’s side, where he had heretofore been forced through fear for his life.

This was the first time he was being given a real choice. Freedom tasted bitter.

“If you don’t know, perhaps you should try to find out,” Petri said, nodding towards Harry’s bedside table. Harry followed his gaze and arrived at the diamond-patterned back of his tarot deck. Dumbledore still was not looking at him, so he slunk out of his chair and went to retrieve his cards.

Feeling a little self-conscious, he shuffled the deck and flipped the top three cards onto the table. What happened if he refused to tell Dumbledore?

Three of wands, three of stars, knave of swords. Harry breathed out a small sigh of relief—no major arcana. The first two cards told him he was looking at what he thought he was, namely, this decision, and the knave of swords… a warning of an enemy plot. And despite their agreement (or perhaps because of it), Harry knew that when it came to his fate, the enemy could be none other than the Dark Lord.

“All right, you—I mean, Rosenkol can tell him,” Harry said. The decision felt right. It would be foolish of him to throw his lot in completely with the Dark Lord when he was destined to die by the man’s hand. Dumbledore had failed to protect him before, but surely he would be doing himself no favours by deliberately making it difficult for the headmaster to help.

“Rosenkol,” Petri called, and the elf shifted into view. “Tell Mr Dumbledore Harry’s secret.”

“Harry is being Harry Potter,” Rosenkol told Dumbledore. His only reaction was to blink softly behind his half-moon spectacles.

“Thank you, Rosenkol. And thank you, Harry,” Dumbledore said, peering at him curiously. “How are you doing?”

“Fine, sir,” said Harry. He didn’t know how else to answer that question. Surely not with complaints about how the Dark Lord had recently cruciated him one too many times.

“Do you fancy joining me on a walk? Perhaps you can show me around the neighbourhood,” said Dumbledore.

Harry glanced to Petri, who nodded. “All right, sir. It’s just a graveyard, though.”

“I find that one can learn many interesting things in forgotten places such as graveyards,” Dumbledore said with a gentle smile. Harry shrugged and slipped into his trainers before surging up the stairs to hold the coffin lid open.

“All these are coffin houses,” Harry said, gesturing to the well-manicured plots of his actual vampire neighbours. “The graves are over there. Where did you want to go, sir?”

Dumbledore chose the left path into the cemetery. “Let’s see if there are any familiar names here. Ah, look, Edgar Stroulger, inventor of the sneakoscope. Are you familiar with sneakoscopes, Harry?”

Now that he could look him in the eye and say it (metaphorically, as Harry was still taking studious care to avoid direct eye-contact), Dumbledore seemed to delight in using Harry’s given name.

“No, sir,” said Harry.

“Marvellous devices… they can detect nearby deception and untrustworthiness,” Dumbledore said. “Alas, not so popular, for they do not discriminate—many owners take offence when they find themselves accused by their own sneakoscopes.”

“Oh. How do they work?” Harry asked. Could an object do some kind of legilimency?

“Emotion, Harry. Emotion leaves magical traces, traces that can be uncovered by anybody who cares to look,” Dumbledore explained.

“That sounds useful,” Harry said, and for some reason, Dumbledore looked at him a little sadly.

“No more useful than our own intuition.” He walked onward, until they passed under the shade of the gnarled yew trees. Then he made a casual gesture with his arm, but Harry saw the wand tip peeking out of his sleeve.

“What spell was that?” Harry asked, sure that something had been cast.

“Something to keep us from being overheard. You will forgive an old man’s paranoia, but there could be ears in even the unlikeliest of places,” said Dumbledore.

“You wanted to talk to me about something important then, sir?” Harry asked. “Away from… Uncle Joachim?”

“You are free to share this conversation with whomever you choose, though I do not recommend speaking too openly. I only wish to give you the option to keep it to yourself. Naturally, my first point of discussion regards Joachim—you are happy in his care? He is not mistreating you?” said Dumbledore.

Harry narrowed his eyes. “He’s better than my real uncle was,” he said honestly. Despite the undeniable costs associated with being Petri’s apprentice, there were tangible benefits, which was already more than he could have said of life at the Dursleys. “What’s it to you? Sir?”

Dumbledore sighed deeply. “I have already made many mistakes, my boy, mistakes which have pushed you directly into the path of danger,” he said. “I merely wish to avoid continuing on that trajectory.”

“Mistakes? Like what?” Harry asked, a little thrown. Certainly, things could have gone better last term with the Dark Lord and the protection of the philosopher’s stone, but Harry wasn’t sure if he would consider anything the result of a mistake, rather than a stroke of exceedingly bad luck. Most importantly, however, why was Professor Dumbledore involved in his life at all? It was Dumbledore who had been given the prophecy regarding Harry and the Dark Lord, and the Dark Lord himself had instantly been convinced that Dumbledore had had some say in Harry’s situation before Hogwarts. Why?

Dumbledore seemed reluctant to enumerate his precise errors. Instead, he said, “I neglected to take an active role in protecting you, foolishly trusting that the safeguards I had left in place would be enough. Needless to say, they failed—some of them quite catastrophically—and though I wish to reassure you that you are safe, I cannot lie to you on this, Harry. Your life is in grave danger.”

“From the Dark Lord?” Harry asked. “He’s back, isn’t he?”

“From Voldemort, yes, precisely. Call him Voldemort, Harry. Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself,” Dumbledore said.

“I know, sir, he—Voldemort showed me,” Harry said. The name felt blasphemous on his tongue but the fear did not come. It only worked in Lord Voldemort’s presence, after all. When a flicker of confusion passed across Professor Dumbledore’s face, he clarified, belatedly, “the thing. With his name. How it makes people afraid. You—I remember you called him Tom. To his face. Is that his real name?”

The lines in Dumbledore’s face tightened ever-so-slightly. “Yes. Tom Riddle. That was his name.”

“Riddle,” Harry repeated a little faintly. That was a fitting name, if he had ever heard one. He wondered why Lord Voldemort had eschewed it.

“After his muggle father,” Dumbledore revealed.

And that explained it.

“Ironic, is it not, that he should lead his pure-blood followers on a crusade against muggle-borns and muggles?” Dumbledore mused.

A memory flashed through Harry’s mind, then, of Barty’s words—‘Who cares about mudbloods when you could be learning to harness the fundamental forces of existence?’

“But does he really care about muggle-borns?” Harry asked. “It just—it doesn’t seem like it. What does the Dark—Lord Voldemort really want?”

“Astute of you, Harry. Voldemort wants nothing less than absolute dominion. He will not rest until every witch and wizard, being and creature, and most certainly, every muggle, bows before him and acknowledges him as their lord. He fears death, fears powerlessness, and so he seeks immortality and control,” Dumbledore said.

That did seem right, Harry thought. Hadn’t Lord Voldemort said as much to him, when questioned directly?

“Immortality,” Harry said with sudden understanding. “You mean, he should have died, back then, when he tried to kill me, but he somehow didn’t? What happened, anyway? I remember reading that he was hit by his own killing curse, but how do they know that? Was there a body?”

“Nobody knows for certain what happened that night except Voldemort and perhaps you, if your memory of it ever resurfaces. However, the evidence suggests that he was indeed struck by his rebounding curse, even though there was no body,” said Dumbledore.

“And how did I just… reflect the killing curse?” Harry asked, frowning.

Dumbledore closed his eyes. “Your mother died to save you. Love—that is something that Voldemort will never understand. A love so deep as your mother’s for you has a power of its own, power that lingers even after the one who loved is gone. Its protection is in your very blood.”

“The protection of blood!” Harry blurted, and surprise flashed across Dumbledore’s face. “But sir, Voldemort _does_ know about that. He tried to teach it to me, even. I mean, when he was possessing Professor Quirrell.”

Dumbledore shook his head. “What your mother did—it was beyond the bounds of any spell. Emotion is its own form of magic, love especially so. We teach wand movements and incantations at Hogwarts, and I am sometimes afraid that we overemphasise these things to the point that students lose sight of the true nature of magic…”

Harry stared eagerly up at Dumbledore, forgetting himself and meeting glimmering blue eyes for a long moment. He looked away quickly—his occlumency was not yet capable of more than momentarily stalling a legilimens. Dumbledore did not elaborate further.

“But if it was something like the protection of blood,” Harry said, and when Dumbledore did not immediately deny it, continued, “then that means it’s gone, doesn’t it? It needs a blood relative, but I haven’t seen my Aunt Petunia in years.”

Dumbledore nodded slowly, his mouth stretched in a grim line. “I have only myself to blame for this oversight. You see, Harry, I did not discover that you were missing from your relatives’ home until almost a year after the fact. Your aunt and uncle kept your disappearance under wraps with impressive discretion, beyond my wildest imaginings. By then, it was too late. You seemed to be untraceable by any conceivable method of detection or tracking. I only prayed that the Quill of Acceptance would be able to address your Hogwarts letter. That it was Joachim Petri who had you, and nobody worse… even in misfortune you are fortunate, Harry.”

“How do you know him, anyway?” Harry asked. “He said something about a war, and you pardoning him.” Harry remembered what Lord Voldemort had said as well. “He was a follower of Grindelwald?”

Dumbledore nodded but did not give any further detail. Harry felt it would be inappropriate to press, as it was not exactly his business.

Instead, he said, “Last year, you already knew I was here, sir. Why are you asking me now, if I like living with Uncle Joachim?” He tried to keep an accusing tone out of his voice, but this belated concern did strike him as incongruous.

“My boy, I’m afraid you may have an exaggerated view of my abilities. Up until ten minutes ago, I had no idea that you might belong anywhere else than in Joachim’s care. I do not doubt his ability to provide for an apprentice—it is the fact that you, Harry Potter, should have been safely at home with your aunt and uncle—”

“No, sir,” said Harry, something in him viscerally repelled by even the notion of returning to the Dursleys and their horrible, mundane existence. “I never want to go back there. This is where I belong.”

Dumbledore inclined his head. “In truth, I am glad to hear that, Harry. There are more ways to protect you here than in a muggle house, now that your mother’s protection is no longer an option.”

“You really think that Voldemort is going to come after me?” Harry asked. “Doesn’t he have better things to do? And I think I told you before, that he told me that his trying to kill me when I was a baby was a miscalculation.”

Dumbledore shook his head grimly. “I am almost certain that Voldemort will target you again. Since you last encountered him, he has acquired a vital piece of information that would have changed his mind.”

“The prophecy!” Harry blurted. Dumbledore could be referring to nothing else. Blue eyes widened.

“Yes… I must admit that I did not expect you to know of it.”

Harry closed his mouth, which was suddenly very dry. He had to make a decision, now, and there were no cards for him to consult.

Dumbledore already knew, somehow, that Voldemort had the prophecy, but he didn’t seem to know about Harry’s involvement. If he really wanted Dumbledore as his ally, this was the moment.

He steeled himself. “I was there. Voldemort put me under the imperius curse. I took the prophecy orb out of the Department of Mysteries.”

It was all true, and he hadn’t implicated himself. Harry’s heart was pounding as he looked up at Dumbledore’s crooked nose. He longed to make eye-contact but did not dare. Dumbledore did not say anything for a long moment—he seemed to be in shock.

“I’m so sorry…” he finally said, looking away. He sounded weary. “So you know everything then. I had hoped that it could wait until you were older. Fate is a terrible, heavy burden to bear, doubly so for the young. But I must ask—how are you here then? How did you escape?”

Dumbledore’s hand had disappeared up his sleeve.

“He let me go,” Harry said. No, that wasn’t strictly right. He spoke more firmly. “I convinced him to let me go. That we would both be better off if neither of us attempted to kill the other, if we just agreed to postpone fate. That’s why I don’t think he’ll try to kill me again—he could have done it then.”

He could not help how his gaze slipped to Dumbledore’s wand hand, which was still out of sight.

“And I’m not under the imperius curse anymore,” he added.

“I am sorry, Harry,” Dumbledore said again. “As much as I would like to take you at your word, there is no way to prove that somebody is not under a well-cast imperius curse. Certainly not Voldemort’s imperius curse.”

 _Seriously?_ Harry wished he had known that before saying anything. He could have claimed that Lord Voldemort had possessed him again—which, incidentally, was also completely true. He had omitted that part with the thought that the imperius curse absolved him of more responsibility, but apparently it went too far.

“There’s really no way at all?” he asked a little desperately.

“None,” Dumbledore confirmed. “It is one of the reasons why the curse is considered unforgivable. There is no way to detect it and no counter. The only defence is for the victim to resist the curse through sheer willpower.”

Harry had to hold himself back from burying his face in his hands. He was such an idiot. It was too late to claim that he could, in fact, resist the imperius curse reliably. That would invalidate literally everything else he had said, or worse, make Dumbledore think that he was behaving erratically and consider it evidence that he really was under the curse.

A thought came to him—legilimency! Could a legilimens tell if somebody was under the imperius curse? But surely, if that was the case, Dumbledore would have brought it up instead of claiming that there was no way, so it was probably also ineffective for some reason.

Still, curiosity forced his hand. “What about legilimency?”

“You really are well-informed, I see,” said Dumbledore.

“Voldemort used it on me,” Harry said a little defensively.

“Alas, while legilimency can sometimes identify a victim of the imperius curse, it too is unreliable when it comes to confirming the curse’s absence,” Dumbledore said. “The mind is not a catalogue to be indexed, and the legilimens can never be sure that he has seen everything.”

He sighed. “I understand, sir,” he muttered “But do you agree that Voldemort isn’t trying to kill me? Even if I were imperiused—actually, especially if I were imperiused, that means he wants me alive, right?”

“You have given me a great deal to think about,” Dumbledore said, evading the question. “Everything I know about Voldemort says that he would never suffer a potential equal to live…”

He seemed lost in thought. Harry panicked as his mind automatically drew connections from those words. Dumbledore believed now that Harry and Voldemort both knew the prophecy. Harry had failed to mention it, so Dumbledore hadn’t realised that Voldemort hadn’t been able to get it out of the orb—it was such a ludicrous obstacle, after all. And now Dumbledore was speaking carelessly of the prophecy’s contents— _a potential equal—_ was that what Harry was? Was that why they were fated to duel to the death?

He held his breath, trying to stop thinking. This was dangerous. There was a reason Harry wanted neither himself nor Voldemort to know the prophecy, and Dumbledore’s apparent conclusions only cemented that reason further. If there was something in there that would catalyse their conflict, it would be unequivocally better for them to remain in ignorance for as long as possible.

And yet, Harry said nothing. What was holding his tongue?

The window of opportunity for clarifying the situation passed. Dumbledore was focused on him again now. “For now, Harry, I ask that you be very careful. Even if Voldemort is uninterested in you for the moment, he could change his mind at any time.”

“All right, sir,” Harry agreed, receiving a serious nod in return.

“On another—though perhaps related—note, I would like you to attend private lessons with me this year, if you would be amenable,” Dumbledore said.

“Private lessons?” Harry repeated, thrown. “On what?”

“Oh, this and that,” said Dumbledore, his lips in a flat, serious line.

“All right, sir,” Harry said when it became clear that he was not about to give further detail. He figured that anything Professor Dumbledore might have to teach him would probably be valuable.

“Very good.” Dumbledore waved his wand, and the chattering of insects and birds suddenly filled a void that Harry had not even been aware of.

They exited the yew grove again, taking the short walk back to the coffin house in silence.

“I shall see you at Hogwarts, Harry. I hope you have a safe remainder of your holiday. Please be careful.” With these parting words, Dumbledore left him at the entrance and apparated away.

Harry checked the time and winced. He had spent far too long with Dumbledore—the information he had learned was invaluable, but it would all be for nothing if Lord Voldemort deemed him a lost cause and decided to off him after all. Lockhart’s book signing was already under way.

At least he had the perfect excuse to go to Flourish and Blotts now.

“What did Dumbledore want?” Petri asked as Harry hurried down the stairs.

“To warn me about the Dark Lord, and to make sure you weren’t mistreating me or anything,” Harry said. “Don’t worry. I didn’t mention the Unforgivables or the inferi. Figured he wouldn’t approve.”

Petri snorted. “Your discretion is appreciated.”

“He also said something about giving me private lessons this year, but he wouldn’t say what kind. What do you think he would be teaching me? Advanced spells?” Harry asked.

“Unlikely,” said Petri. “Private lessons… Dumbledore’s speciality is alchemy, which is hardly suitable for a second-year student. He is well-versed in a wide variety of magic, however, so I couldn’t say what he might wish to teach you.”

Harry nodded distractedly, grabbing his money bag and travel cloak.

“Are you going out?” Petri asked.

“To get my school books,” Harry said, reaching under his bed and trying to stuff his invisibility cloak into his pocket without Petri seeing.

“I’ll come with you,” Petri said. “I need to pick up the latest issue of _Challenges in Charming._ ”

Harry paused for a moment. He hadn’t planned for Petri to come along, but he supposed it wasn’t exactly a problem for him either. He shrugged, thankful that Petri was ready to leave in almost an instant.

There was a snaking queue coming out of Flourish and Blotts when they arrived and a huge crowd of people milling about besides. Most of them were witches, dressed in a multitude of bright colours.

“What in Merlin’s name is going on here?” Petri demanded. “Perhaps we should come back later.”

“No, let’s try to get inside. I don’t think the queue’s for books, it’s for something else,” Harry said, pressing up closer to the storefront so he that he could pretend to see a flier. “Look. It’s a book signing, by Lockhart. He’s the author of our all the books I need. If we come back later they might be sold out.”

Petri had a strange look on his face, and Harry wondered if he might have been selling the point too hard. Turning away, he tried to squeeze himself between a pair of chuckling witches in an attempt to get through the door.

“I’ll wait outside!” Petri called to him. Harry had been worried that somebody would see him cast the imperius curse, but he did not even think the invisibility cloak would be necessary at this point. There were so many people crammed into the shop that nobody would be able to properly see a thing, let alone hear what spell he had cast. He wouldn’t even need Lucius’s distraction, whatever that was supposed to be.

Unfortunately, even getting close to Lockhart was going to be difficult. As soon as he made it inside, Harry found himself shoved up against a bookcase alongside several other miserable-looking boys around his age, while a harried shop wizard tried futilely to keep people from breaking the queue. He recognised one of the boys as Ron Weasley, from Gryffindor.

“Hello Ron,” he said, searching for some gap to squeeze through and failing. He turned back to the shelf and saw that while _The Standard Book of Spells_ series had been placed conveniently by the door, Lockhart’s books were nowhere in sight. He groaned. Was he going to have to get in the queue after all?

“O, ‘lo,” said Ron. “This is mad. You here for school books? My mum’s up there. Reckon she fancies Lockhart.” He whispered this, as if anybody would overhear him in the crowded shop.

Before Harry could respond, Draco Malfoy emerged from the back of the shop, shrunken package of books in hand. He sneered as he caught sight of Ron and strutted over.

“Fan of Lockhart’s, Malfoy? Didn’t take you for the type,” Ron fired off preemptively. “Wait, on second thought…”

“Didn’t you hear, Weasley? Lockhart is going to be our new Defence professor. But I suppose your father wouldn’t know about important information like that. He’d have to pay for the privilege, and you’d all starve. Perhaps he could sell a few of you off,” said Draco.

“I reckon your father—” Ron closed his mouth as Lucius Malfoy appeared behind Draco, apparently not ready to insult him to his face.

“Ron, there you are. Let’s go outside, it’s so hot in here.” A redheaded man who could only be Mr Weasley was coming up with two identical boys holding armfuls of books. A frisson of tension passed through the air as he and Lucius Malfoy made eye contact.

“Well, well, if it isn’t Arthur Weasley,” Lucius drawled.

This was his distraction, Harry realised, as the two adults exchanged heated barbs like schoolchildren. He ducked behind a bookshelf just as Arthur leapt forward with a yell and they descended into fisticuffs. There was great rumble and books rained down on the brawling men, before they were lost in a puff of acrid purple smoke from the Daily Prophet photographer’s bulky camera.

“Gentlemen—gentlemen!” the shop wizard yelled in desperation, wringing his hands. Had everybody forgotten how to use their wands?

Harry whipped out his invisibility cloak and wrapped himself up, hurrying around the perimeter of the congregating crowd. Lockhart was in the back, surrounded by pictures of his own face on an array of posters and books. “Now, now, ladies and gentlemen,” he was saying, “Keep calm, keep calm. No need to fight—there’s more than enough of me to go around.” Every Lockhart, including the real one, flashed dazzling smiles in tandem. Nobody in the crowd was paying him any mind though—the shop was in chaos.

Turning to the side, where a concerned wizard in unassuming brown robes was whispering frantically to him, Lockhart muttered, “No, no, don’t worry. You can work the fight into the article too. It’s all publicity.”

Harry took the shot. “ _Imperio!_ ” he whispered harshly, feeling the connection form right away, a warm, liquid string from wand to mind. Lockhart froze and seemed to space out for a moment. That wouldn’t do.

 _Act normally_ , Harry thought furiously. He couldn’t fail—he had to subjugate Lockhart’s will right now or everything would go to ruin. A thought suddenly came to him. If he needed control, who better to emulate than Lord Voldemort? He reached for the memory of being the Dark Lord, the natural feeling of rightness as Avery grovelled at his feet, as Quirrell knelt and stared at him with equal parts admiration and terror, arm extended for cursed scarification.

Lockhart smiled brilliantly.

Harry let out the breath he was holding. Now there was nothing to do but wait. Lockhart’s book signing went all the way until four thirty in the afternoon. Harry commanded him to sneak away once he would not be missed. Then he hid behind another shelf and took off his invisibility cloak, coming back around with an armful of school books and a copy of the charms journal Petri had wanted.

Petri was exactly where Harry had expected—skulking in the alley between Flourish and Blotts and Madam Malkin’s. “Here,” he said, handing over the miniaturized _Challenges in Charming_.

“Thank you. Let’s get out of here,” Petri muttered, pushing past the crowd that was still trying to push its way into the book store.

It was long past their usual bed time by the time they made it back home, but Harry couldn’t sleep. He was too nervous that the slippery thread of the imperius curse would snap the moment his attention slipped from it. It was probably a silly fear, since he knew that people could be kept under the curse indefinitely, during which the caster had to spend time unconscious—Barty had been under it for ten years, after all—but he really did not want to botch this up.

Once they retired and he heard Petri’s breathing even out, Harry rolled over carefully and pointed his wand at the adjacent bed. “ _Exspectato dormi_!” he whispered, casting the sleeping enchantment that he had learned while practising the dream-induction charm. As Petri was already asleep, the enchantment succeeded easily. That would ensure that he slept through the rest of the day. He repeated the same treatment on Rosenkol, whose nest was underneath Petri’s bed, and then got up to read while he waited.

Lockhart arrived around sunset, much later than Harry had expected, still dressed to impress in royal purple robes. He looked around the coffin house curiously as he swept down the stairs.

“Quaint place you have here,” he remarked. “Bit cramped though. And the décor is rather drab… ah, but I’m sure my books are livening things up! Which is your favourite? Don’t be shy now.”

Harry stared up at him with bloodshot eyes, wondering what was going through Lockhart’s head. He knew that it was difficult to realise that one was under the imperius—that was one of the major steps to resisting it—but he had never had an extended experience under the curse where he had been expected to go about his mundane life. Surely the euphoric haze had to lift somewhat in order to enable basic functioning?

“I liked _Voyages with Vampires_ ,” Harry told him. He focused on the thread that linked them. The imperius curse combined the will of the caster and the victim. If Lockhart was proficient with the memory charm as the Dark Lord had promised, then his skill in tandem with Harry’s knowledge of what needed to be erased should work seamlessly together.

“ _Obliviate!_ ” Lockhart cast at the unconscious Petri. Harry had him do it to Rosenkol too. He could only hope that it had worked as intended.

While Harry was distracted, Lockhart put away his wand and wandered over to the stack of books on the table, all displaying his face on the front cover. He produced a brilliantly green and blue peacock-feather quill. “And whom should I address this to?”

Harry realised numbly that he was intending to autograph the books. “Harry,” he said.

‘To my number one fan, Harry,’ he wrote with a flourish, and signed in sweeping, giant letters that covered the flyleaf in sapphire ink.

“Here you go, young man. Always happy to do a house call for one of my dedicated fans,” he said, smiling widely. “You’re a student at Hogwarts, aren’t you? Well, you’re in luck, because you’ll be seeing me there all year as your Defence Against the Dark Arts professor! Which house are you in?”

“Ravenclaw,” Harry answered, chilled by the small talk. He felt for the connection of the imperius curse. It pulsed warmly in his mind’s eye. Remembering with clarity Petri’s lecture about how unreliable the curse could be, how it felt exactly the same whether or not the victim was truly under its influence, he pursed his lips.

“Ah, Ravenclaw. I used to be a Ravenclaw myself. A fine house,” said Lockhart, his smile souring a little for some reason.

 _Go away. Just go away now_ , Harry thought. His whole face felt warm with relief when Lockhart’s eyes went blank as he made for the door mechanically.

He remembered his last directive and amended his command. Lockhart needed to go to Barty’s house, where he would be ‘taken out of Harry’s hands’.

Lockhart stopped, turned on his heel, robes billowing, and disappeared with a crack.


	43. Receiver

“Your imperius curse needs improvement,” Lord Voldemort told Harry, turning away from where Barty lay on the floor heaving and gasping and still weeping silver tears after another occlumency lesson.

“Any tips? My Lord?” Harry asked, a little offended. What had the Dark Lord expected? It was his first time casting it on an unwilling person, which, he reflected, was extremely illegal. Now he was certifiably a dark wizard, if he hadn’t been one before.

The Dark Lord smirked at him, evidently in a good mood. “Several. First, your intent is too narrow, too instrumental. The essence of the curse is not simply to make somebody do a particular thing, it is to make somebody do everything and anything for you, to subjugate their will completely. Next, your will must also be very clear, or the subject will devolve into acting from habit even in an inappropriate situation.”

Harry flushed. Barty had told him that he had discovered Lockhart dithering on the front step with his quill out, attempting to autograph the front door.  The memory charm, at least, had worked. Harry was sure of this because Petri had woken up that evening and immediately known that he had been subjected to it—what had tipped him off, Harry had no idea, but he had pretended to be just as panicked about the situation. Petri had ended up suspecting Silviu, but there was no proof in any case, nor any way to recover the lost memories.

Lord Voldemort eyed him knowingly. “Finally, a strategy which I personally find useful is to give reasons for your commands. The subject is much less likely to resist when they can find a ready explanation for their actions. You’ll find that it doesn’t take much to convince someone that they’re really doing everything of their own free will.”

Harry felt cold at this advice. He knew how to resist the euphoria of the imperius and to disregard orders. He could even refuse on principle to do something innocuous, just because. But to resist the simultaneous compulsion of both force and reason…

Well, it didn’t matter. He wasn’t under the Dark Lord’s imperius curse, and he knew that for a fact, just as he knew that he was awake and not dreaming, even if it was impossible to prove it from the outside.

“Thank you, My Lord. I’ll keep that in mind for next time,” Harry said, though he hoped there would not be a next time.

“Very good. You may go,” said the Dark Lord. Harry braced himself and stepped into the floo, vowing to pivot properly on exit this time to avoid overbalancing.

His plan was foiled when the destination fireplace turned out to be smaller than he had expected and spat him out feet first, sending him skidding across a familiar but incorrect wood floor. A heavy wooden coffin, cut with a classic bevel, loomed upright above him. How was he here? He swore he had said the correct address without coughing or stuttering.

“Harry? What a surprise! Come to visit little old me?” Leticia asked, cackling from behind the counter. Her face was back to its normal greenish and warty form, which was honestly less uncanny than the beautified version. Harry righted himself, rubbing at his bruised tailbone and trying to shake off the soot.

Deciding that it would be rude to say that he had arrived by accident, he said, “Hi Leticia. How have you been?”

“Wonderful, just wonderful. And you, Harry dear?” she asked, pushing up her wild fringe to reveal startlingly pale eyes. Harry could not help fidgeting a little under her piercing gaze.

“Fine. Just coming back from visiting a friend,” he said. He had been going to his occlumency lessons every week under the guise of racing with Draco. Actually, Petri did not know even that much, only that he was seeing a friend from school. Funny how he was lying about his lie.

“A friend? What’s he like? Smells like a blond,” said Leticia, sniffing exaggeratedly with her pointed nose.

“He is blond, I suppose,” Harry said, thinking of Barty. “Can you actually smell that? How does that even work?”

Leticia cackled in delight. “Gotcha good, didn’t I? You’ve got some blond hairs right there. Figured I had a fifty-fifty shot of your friend being a boy or a crup.” She pointed to Harry’s sleeve, where he discovered that there were indeed several short golden hairs clinging to the fabric, probably from Barty’s couch. He brushed them off sheepishly.

“Oh,” he mumbled.

“So what brings you here? Had a floo redirection, did you?” Leticia asked knowingly. Harry glanced back at the fireplace and shrugged. The hag snickered. “Lucky you came out here and not Borgin’s. Network Authority’s been doing maintenance on the other side of the alley all morning but I reckon they’re about to start our side any minute now.”

“Does the floo always just shunt you randomly when the fireplace you’re trying to get to is blocked?” Harry asked, seeing no point in prevaricating further.

“Usually goes to the next free one,” Leticia said. She leered. “Which one exactly is _next_ I couldn’t tell you though—it’s some mad system put together by wizards. If witches had made it then it would make infinitely more sense, of course.” Harry nodded along awkwardly. She continued, tapping the side of her head, “Something goes wrong up here in wizards as they grow up. You’d better be careful so it doesn’t happen to you.”

“I’ll try,” Harry mumbled, not sure if she was serious. Talk of witches and wizards reminded him of something he had been wondering for a while. Would it be rude to ask? He decided that Leticia was always a little rude anyway, so it would be strange of her to get offended in turn. “By the way, are there… boy hags?”

Leticia blinked at him before cackling so heartily that her wild fringe fell over her eyes again. Her shoulders shook. “Boy hags? What do you think? Are there male maledicti?”

“What? Maledicti?” Harry repeated haltingly. Leticia leaned forward, and he imagined that she was squinting at him.

“Maledicti, you know, bloodline cursed witches?” Leticia said. “Only witches.”

“Why only witches?” Harry asked. “How do we know that?”

Leticia snorted. “Ever heard of a wizard having a baby? I’d hope not. Bloodlines and everything that comes with them belong to witches.” After a pause, she said, “You do know how babies work, right?”

“Of course I do,” he said, flushing. Did Leticia think that _he_ was a baby? “So you’re a maledicti?”

“A maledictus,” she corrected. “Perhaps, in a manner of speaking.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Harry muttered, furrowing his eyebrows.

Leticia put a clawed finger to her mouth. “It’s a secret. No wizard knows how a hag is born.”

Harry didn’t believe her. “I’m sure there’s a book—”

Her shriek of laughter interrupted him. “A book? I assure you, no hag today ever learned to become one from a book. A malediction written is just a rude poem.”

Malediction—he had the niggling feeling that he had heard the word before, but he couldn’t remember where. Certainly not in Professor Quirrell’s class. If not official lessons, perhaps from the Dark Lord?

“What’s going through that cute little head of yours now, Harry?” Leticia asked. “Did I disappoint you? Were you hoping to become a hag in your old age?”

Harry grimaced. How to put it politely? There wasn’t a way. “No, not really.”

“That’s for the best. Even if it were possible I’d think it a poor trade. I’ve heard from Silvy that you’re quite the wizard,” she said, smirking. 

“I don’t know about that. There was that healing charm I failed the other day,” Harry said dryly, trying to think of any other time Silviu had seen him attempt magic.

“Nonsense. You’ve got strong magic, mark my words. I can smell it!” Leticia said.

“I’m not falling for that again,” Harry said, even as she leaned forwards and took another long sniff. She beckoned for him to come closer, and he moved without thinking, glancing up at her expectantly.

Her mouth was open, but she wasn’t saying anything. Harry froze, but too late—her arm shot out suddenly, taking a fistful of his robes and slamming him into the counter. Pain erupted from his nose as his glasses smashed into his face. He tasted iron in his throat. Hot, rancid breath wafted over him, and he struggled to right himself, but an immovable force kept him pinned to the table. Both his arms were held down in short order. Something warm and wet dripped onto his ear, and scraggly hair like bristles tickled his nape.

Harry threw his head back with all his might, hoping to strike her, but only succeeded in straining his neck. A slimy tongue licked at the shell of his ear. He screamed.

With a bang, the back door of the shop burst open, and a black blur flew out, materialising into a youthful Silviu.

“Stop!” he commanded, his eyes gleaming like hot coals, and Harry felt his whole body seize up. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move a muscle as he slid from the shop counter and collapsed to the floor. A moment later, the feeling let up somewhat, and he managed to turn shakily to look for Leticia, who was slumped on the counter, her hat crumpled beneath one cheek.

“What is going on here?” Silviu demanded, eyes still bloodshot but no longer glowing. 

Harry met his gaze and the events of the past thirty seconds flashed in his mind’s eye, a jumbled mess of panic and disgust. Silviu hurried to him and scooped him up, propping him upright and placing both hands on his shoulders protectively.

“Leticia, did you take the potion?” he asked levelly. There was something strikingly hypnotic in his voice. Harry felt drowsy, though he had no trouble standing on his feet.

“I did, I did,” Leticia gasped. “I’m sorry Silvy, it wasn’t enough. I still couldn’t resist. I’m sorry, Harry.”

“I know. That’s why we said no children. It’s my fault.” Silviu’s grip on Harry’s shoulders tightened, though not painfully. “Harry, please, for you own good, don’t walk through the alley during the day any more, not until you’re older. Magical children are a special temptation to hags. Irresistible. It overtakes their minds. If I hadn’t been there…”

Harry wanted to protest, but Silviu was right. If he hadn’t been right there, Leticia might well have taken a bite out of him, or worse.

“I wasn’t even walking, though,” he said. “The floo dropped me here. Leticia says the whole other side of the street is on maintenance.”

“I see. Be that as it may, my advice still stands. I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to you,” Silviu murmured. Harry froze at the clenching of concern in his chest.

“You don’t need to worry about me,” he said a little shakily. “You still have the rest of the company too.”

“They’re adults. They can take care of themselves,” Silviu said. He paused and glanced at Leticia. “Mostly. I know you can take care of yourself too, Harry, but please, let me help you. You deserve the chance to be a child.”

Harry’s mind was racing. Had something happened to Silviu?

Something had. Harry hadn’t seen him since the changing of fate—he hadn’t exactly been avoiding him, but had intentionally not passed by his usual haunts. But how could one memory have affected so much? The emotion resonating through his body, a rushing feeling, almost like drowning, could not be mistaken. It had been there before, in some nascent form, but now it was in full bloom, delicate and blazing with colour like wildflowers in the dead of winter. It couldn’t be natural. What had he done?

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” Silviu said. “You’re safe in the alley—I’ll ensure it.”

Harry believed him, and that was the problem. He swallowed and tried to calm himself before he did something suspicious.

“Thanks,” he mumbled. “I suppose I should go home now. That was where I was going, anyway, I mean.”

“I’ll walk you home,” Silviu said.

Harry glanced sceptically outside. “It’s sunny,” he said.

“I can endure it.” Silviu was already steering him towards the door. Harry ripped himself out of his loose grip and turned to him with a resolute frown.

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve walked home just fine loads of times. I have my wand. Now I know,” he said, jerking his head to Leticia, who looked away. “I’ll be careful. Go back to bed.”

Silviu said nothing for a long moment, but finally broke out into a small smile and acquiesced.

Surprised, for he had been expecting much more resistance from the usually stubborn vampire, he nodded and fled the shop before Silviu could change his mind.

Harry  sprinted all the way home. He burst through the coffin door and slid down the stairs, flailing wildly. “Something’s wrong with Silviu! Did I mess something up changing his fate?”

Petri looked up from where he was hunched over the table and squinted at him. “Slow down. What exactly is ‘wrong’ with him? Does he still remember the truth?”

“No! Well, I don’t think so. I don’t know. There’s not exactly an obvious way to tell. But he was really…” Harry paused, deciding that he ought not to reveal what had almost happened with Leticia, “really concerned about me for no good reason. Even offered to walk me home through the sunlight. I was at his shop, by the way, because the floo here was blocked. Maintenance.”

“That sounds perfectly normal,” Petri said.

“It’s not!” Harry insisted. “I know he’s a responsible adult and everything, but not that much. And he didn’t end up walking with me, actually. He listened to me when I told him he didn’t need to. He never listens to me.”

Petri held up a hand. “He listened to you because you are the one who changed his fate.”

“What?” Harry demanded. “I thought you said it was just changing memories, nothing else, not—”

“I said no such thing,” Petri told him, straightening up and folding his hands behind his back. “I thought I explained it to you already. The changing of fate uses the ability of the dead to impart information to the living. The dead are not conscious. They are nothing more than a collection of memories and habits. In that sense, vampires are not dead, because they can think and feel for themselves. But they lack one crucial ability of the living—the ability to grow, to change naturally. Their consciousness only persists because of magic, and magic cannot create that which it has never seen. Magic cannot make will. You know that. So when you make an external change, it’s permanent. It becomes part of their being. And your very ability to make that change, your ownership over that piece of them—that, too, becomes part of their being.”

Harry’s eyes widened and his breath caught in his throat. “You mean his soul. I changed his  _soul_ .”

“You know I dislike that word,” Petri said, but that was as much as confirmation.

Harry clawed at his hair, grimacing. “But you can change the fate of living people too, can’t you? Is that changing their soul, or whatever, too?”

Petri shook his head. “Your consciousness comes from your body,” he said, tapping the side of his head. “Your brain. It naturally works to undo external influences, so such oblique techniques are not effective for long. Pointless, when the imperius curse can do much better.”

Shaken by the proof his own success, Harry took to Petri’s favourite pastime—avoiding the problem. There was just a little over a week before term began again, and so he shut himself at home, practising his animation and reading Lockhart’s books.

He slogged through them all out of a guilt-induced desire to know the person whose life he had helped to ruin. Harry wasn’t stupid. Voldemort was never going to let Lockhart have his free will back—even if he decided to end the imperius curse, the man would, at best, be forced to choose between swearing allegiance and death.

Lockhart’s books, however, raised more questions than they answered. It was like he was a different person in each one—the spells he preferred to use, the strategies he employed, and even his ultimate goals varied wildly. In  _Wanderings with Werewolves_ , Lockhart expressed a desire for harmony between all people, magical, human, or not, and went to great lengths not to hurt anybody, fighting primarily with transfiguration. Yet in  _Break with a Banshee,_ he took a hard stance on the need to exterminate dark creatures, muting and blinding the Bandon Banshee with powerful cutting curses before going in for the kill.  _Gadding with Ghouls_ presented yet another facet of his personality—a careless, mercenary attitude and a reliance on trickery and traps to catch the pesky beasts he had been hired to remove from people’s homes.

Harry left the house only for his final occlumency lesson, which, he could proudly report, he managed to survive through without being murdered or even cruciated by Lord Voldemort. Though he was still unable to throw Barty out of his head, he could recover enough of his wits while under attack to resist the guidance of the legilimens and break eye contact. The Dark Lord apparently considered this adequate progress.

They could not meet while Harry was at Hogwarts, of course, so Harry would have to practise on his own now that the summer holidays had come to an end.

“Dumbledore has arranged transport for us through the muggle world,” Petri told Harry on the morning of September first, his mouth a thin line.

“What?” Harry demanded, still groggy from having to change his sleep schedule back to a diurnal one, and not prepared for surprises. “What’s wrong with floo?” He couldn’t believe those words were coming out of his mouth—there was plenty wrong with floo, like how it spun him around at vomit-inducing speeds and left him dizzy and covered with soot every time, but it definitely had convenience going for it.

“It’s insecure,” said Petri, sighing. “Some malicious person could slice the network to block or even redirect you, if they knew when you’d be travelling. Dumbledore is taking a very serious stance on your protection now.”

“Okay then,” Harry muttered. 

He couldn’t exactly tell Dumbledore that Lord Voldemort did not need to resort to some complicated method like floo network slicing to get his hands on him. A note from Barty would suffice, and Harry would present himself to the Dark Lord like the friends presented themselves to Silviu—with old fear that had long since twisted itself into a parody of trust. He knew he couldn’t count on Lord Voldemort not to kill him even if he did exactly as he was told, but unfortunately he  _could_ be sure that if he tested their tenuous accord, the consequences would be dire indeed.

As soon as they opened the coffin lid, water streamed in, and Petri cursed under his breath and cast  _impervius_ at every visible surface. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Harry’s ratty trainers squelched in the mud as he climbed out, and he struggled to keep his feather-light trunk steady against the onslaught of the wind and rain, which threatened to tear it out of his grasp.

“Can we apparate?” Harry yelled, fighting to make himself heard over the roaring of water. He was half tempted to turn right around and go into the public floo, security be damned.

“Risky with luggage,” Petri shouted back, shaking his head.

They ran until they made it into the dry cocoon of the Leaky Cauldron, gasping and dripping everywhere. Harry sucked in the warm smell of grease and salt, grimacing and flexing his sweaty fingers around the handle of his trunk. Despite the charms, he felt gross and wet, and he was sure that rainwater had seeped under his robes. Petri waved his wand in a tight zigzag, blasting them both with the hot-air charm, before vanishing the puddle beneath their feet.

“Nasty weather,” said the barman. “Off to Hogwarts? A bite to eat before you go?”

“No thank you, we’re in a hurry,” Petri told him, and beckoned for Harry to follow him out into the muggle side.

They had just got dry! Muggle London was exactly as horribly wet as the wizarding side. Harry tucked himself under the eaves of the pub, just out of range of the water sluicing down from the overflowing gutters.

A sleek black car suddenly pulled up right in front of the Leaky Cauldron out of nowhere, and the window rolled down. A shock of bright pink hair caught Harry’s eye as the car’s occupant stuck her head out. It was Tonks! What was she doing here? Hadn’t she left school?

“Wotcher, Harry!” she called. “Climb in! You too, Mr Peters.”

Mystified, Harry hesitantly stepped forward. Petri had no such reservations. He gestured impatiently for Harry to hand over his trunk, popped it in the boot, which had come open with a tap of his wand, and slid into the back seat of the car as if he had done it hundreds of times before.

“I didn’t know wizards used cars,” Harry mumbled as he slammed the door shut after himself, cutting off the sound of rain completely. There must be silencing charms. The seats were stiff and leather, and Harry felt a little bad about getting them wet. He searched for a seatbelt to no avail as they shot off onto the road.

“More trouble than they’re worth to enchant properly,” Petri opined. “Where did Dumbledore get this?”

“Borrowed it from the Ministry,” said Tonks, turning right around to look at them.

“Shouldn’t you be watching the road?” Harry cried in some alarm. They were rapidly approaching the back of a lorry. Tonks glanced at it, unconcerned by their impending doom. At the last second, they swerved slightly and seemed to squeeze right into the impossibly narrow gap between lanes. Harry gaped.

“Don’t worry,” Tonks said, “Fudge rides in these. They’re undetectable and practically indestructible.”

“Fudge?” Harry repeated in confusion.

“The Minister of Magic,” Petri explained, and Harry flushed. “I knew Dumbledore had his ear, but I wasn’t aware it extended this far.”

“Well, it helps that it was for Harry Potter,” Tonks said, and then promptly acquired a glazed expression. She blinked in consternation for a few moments, shaking her head. “Sorry. Lost my train of thought there. What was I—right, with the Azkaban breakout, Fudge doesn’t want another scandal. I reckon Dumbledore just reminded him that the escapees were former followers of You-Know-Who and they’d love to get revenge for their master.”

Tonks refocused on Harry. “So Harry, how was your summer? You excited to go back to Hogwarts?”

Harry’s mind immediately jumped to the Dark Lord and then to occlumency lessons, inferius-making lessons, and Silviu’s friends. Sadly, none of these topics was remotely suitable to talk about.

“It was fine. I’m excited to see my friends again, but I don’t know about homework…” he said. Tonks laughed. “How about you? What are you doing now?”

“I’m an auror trainee,” Tonks said with a proud grin, twisting to indicate a badge on her chest. It showed a vertical wand with a shower of stars coming out of the tip, but it was grey and not red like an actual auror’s badge.

“Congrats,” Harry told her, “What’s that like?”

“Awful,” Tonks said cheerfully. “Drills all day every day, and on top of that we have to memorise tomes of stupid regulations. I had to get an exemption to come get you today—managed to convince the higher-ups that it would be a good training exercise to escort somebody high-profile…”

She trailed off, butting up against the effect of the fidelius charm.

“How long do you have to train for?” Harry asked hurriedly, and her gaze refocused.

“Two or three years. Depends on if you can pass the exit exams on the first go. Why, you interested in becoming an auror?” Tonks asked, wiggling her pink eyebrows.

“I haven’t really thought about that yet,” Harry said. “It’s a bit early.”

Also, he thought a little dismally, he didn’t yet know if he would be surviving to see his Hogwarts graduation, so planning his career now seemed a little presumptive.

“You’re good at charms, so you’d be a good auror,” Tonks said. “You won’t believe how useful the random stuff we learned in charms club is. Even the dumbest spells—especially those, actually, are great in duels, ‘cause the other guy won’t see it coming.”

She proceeded to regale him with several tales of her exploits with unconventional charms at the Auror Academy. Harry grinned when she brought up using the knitting charm on some rude young men. He still remembered that first charms club meeting.

By the time the car pulled up in front of King’s Cross, it had stopped raining and the sun was even shining through a gap in the clouds. Tonks led them into a side entrance to the station, which looked entirely muggle to Harry, all metal and brick and plastic and crowded with people.

“Here we are,” said Tonks, stopping in front of a ticket machine next to platform nine, where there was a short queue of people in suits. Harry glanced past it doubtfully to the grungy but modern yellow train waiting on the tracks, nothing like the rustic, scarlet steam engine that was the Hogwarts Express.

Petri pulled out his wand and cast structure sight on himself, in plain view of all the muggles. As a matter of fact, Harry realised that they must look like freakshows, dressed in robes and waving sticks around in the middle of a pack of commuters. Only Tonks looked remotely normal, and that was with her spiky pink hair, punk T-shirt, and ripped jeans. Fortunately, it seemed that most of the passersby were too busy to pay them any mind for more than a curious second.

“You have to go through the barrier between nine and ten,” Tonks said, gesturing to the metal frame that held up the plastic platform numbers on either side.

“Don’t hesitate, or you won’t like the results,” Petri said. He cancelled his spell and stepped forward briskly. Just before he reached the barrier, he vanished into thin air. Tonks gave Harry a thumbs up and a little push forwards.

Right. Don’t hesitate. He waited for a chattering family to pass by before he broke into a run, eyes closed. The robotic drone of train announcements cut off abruptly, replaced by human chatter, and the faint scent of smoke filled his nostrils. Harry opened his eyes to the familiar rustic brick of Platform Nine and Three-Quarters. He blinked, a little disorientated at seeing it from the opposite angle—the public fireplaces were on the far end, by the last car.

He glanced around for Petri and found him standing off to the side. Tonks materialised in front of the barrier just then, head swivelling back and forth.

“No dark wizards around,” she reported. Harry made the mistake of glancing into Petri’s crinkled eyes and had to choke back a laugh at the irony. Tonks saluted them. “Well, I’m heading off then. There’s enough security here, so you won’t need little old me. Have fun at Hogwarts, Harry!”

“Thanks,” said Harry, waving at her. “Good luck with your auror training.”

Tonks groaned theatrically before she turned on her heel and disapparated with a loud crack. Harry surveyed the platform for any familiar faces, but saw only a few older students being fussed over by their families or waiting around for friends. Along the walls, he noticed there were red-robed aurors standing very stiffly—that must have been what Tonks had meant about security.

“See you at Christmas, I suppose, Uncle Joachim,” Harry said, turning to Petri. “Unless you’ll be on a trip again?”

“I may be,” Petri said. “But not for more than a few days. I expect you to keep your skills sharp—I have much to teach you once your transfiguration is at an acceptable level.”

Harry nodded. Petri had given him no specific exercises to work on, but he had promised to start him on conjuration of spirits once he proved that he had adequately mastered  some  other immaterial conjurations. Confusingly, some  conjurations were considered charms and others transfigurations, and it was the transfiguration spells that he had to learn.

Straightening his tie, Harry took one last look around the platform, squinting at the fireplaces to see if anybody he knew happened to have emerged. No such luck. He stepped up onto the train, which seemed to sigh beneath him, and frowned as he glanced over the nearest compartments, all occupied. Some of his friends were bound to be here already, so he probably couldn’t just go into an empty compartment and expect them to find him. Renewing his grip on his trunk, he began walking, peering into each compartment in search of a familiar face.

He stumbled upon Neville about halfway down the train. He was sitting next to Hermione Granger, who had her face standoffishly buried in  _Gadding with Ghouls_ . Harry waved, trying to get Neville’s attention, but he was staring out the window—instead, Hermione noticed him over the edge of her book. A smile broke out on her face and she gestured for him to enter.

“Harry! How are you? How was your summer?” she asked, putting her book down carefully on the seat next to her. Neville whipped around at the trundling of the compartment door.

“Oh, hullo,” he greeted.

“Hi Neville, Hermione. It was fine,” he muttered, shuffling inside. “What are you reading?” he asked Hermione, even though he had already seen.

“ _Gadding with Ghouls_. It’s one of our textbooks, though I suppose it’s more of a memoir than a spellbook. Still, it’s very informative,” Hermione said.

“I’m surprised you haven’t read them all,” Harry teased. Hermione shook her head.

“Oh no, I have. It’s my third time through,” she explained. Harry groaned. He should have known.

“Don’t you get bored reading stuff you’ve already read?” he asked, swinging his feather-light trunk up onto the rack and taking the seat across from her and next to Neville.

“You’d think so, but no! It gets more interesting every time. You notice new things that you missed before—you should give it a try,” she said.

“I’m not that Ravenclawish, and I’m a Ravenclaw,” Harry said. “Besides, there’s so much new stuff to read that I already don’t have time for.”

“At Hogwarts maybe, but not over the summer. The homework didn’t even last a week. It’s a shame Madam Pince won’t let us check out library books over the holidays. And our book lists came so late this year! I barely had time to get to Diagon Alley,” Hermione complained.

“They had trouble finding a new Defence Against the Dark Arts professor,” Harry recalled, trying to remember where he had heard that. From the Dark Lord, perhaps?

“Professor Quirrell’s left then?” Hermione asked, and Harry remembered that there had been no official announcement concerning his departure at the end of term. “But who is it going to be, then? They didn’t say who it was on the letter, did they? Whoever it is seems to like Lockhart quite a bit. Though that’s not surprising, with how accomplished he is.”

Harry’s face fell a little at the reminder of the man’s achievements, all moot in the face of an unforgivable curse. “Yeah, that’s because it’s Lockhart himself who’s going to be the teacher.”

“Really? How do you know? I suppose that would make sense,” Hermione said.

“He had a book signing at Flourish and Blotts, and he told everybody there,” Harry said.

“Wow. What was he like?” asked Hermione, leaning forward.

Searching for a respectable description, Harry finally said, “He was very put together.” And very fond of giving autographs, clearly, but he felt that that would be inappropriate to say. Honestly, he had not paid the man himself much mind, having been too focused on casting the imperius curse properly.

“I bet he’ll be an amazing teacher,” Hermione gushed. “He’s good at so many different kinds of magic—I didn’t realise that transfiguration could be used for defence until I read _Wanderings with Werewolves_. Oh, you’ve read his books, haven’t you?”

“Of course,” said Harry. “But just once. What do you reckon he’s going to teach, though? The spells he uses in them seem pretty advanced, or they’re, well, charms and transfiguration, or even potions.”

“Theory, maybe, on how to deal with dark creatures,” Hermione speculated. “Sort of like what we started covering at the end of last term, about doxies.”

“I wouldn’t call doxies dark creatures,” Harry pointed out. “They’re just pests. Dark creatures are like, well, vampires.”

“You’re part-vampire,” Hermione pointed out, as if he didn’t already know that.

Harry shrugged. “Yeah. It’s the ‘part’ part, that’s key. I’m not going to be attacking anybody for their blood. I wonder why we aren’t learning about how to defend against actual dangerous creatures.”

“It’s too advanced, I expect,” Hermione said. “You aren’t going to stop a vampire for long with jinxes or even hexes, and I’ve never even read about how to protect yourself from their magic. Lockhart— _Professor_ Lockhart had to get him with a curse in _Voyages with Vampires_ , remember?”

“That’s true,” Harry muttered. And Lockhart’s curse had only worked because the vampire hadn’t been a wizard too, and couldn’t cast a counter curse. Harry’s current best idea for a defence was the imperius curse, which wasn’t exactly second-year material. Even if it probably wouldn’t be illegal to cast it on a vampire, it would at least be frowned upon.

A shrill whistle interrupted their conversation. The train shuddered into motion, trundling away from the platform and picking up speed as it pulled out of the station into an expansive field. Harry glanced over to Neville, who still hadn’t said a word. He was looking a bit stiff and pale.

“Hey, so how was your summer?” Harry asked him.

“O-oh, it was all right,” Neville mumbled. “Great Uncle Algie came to stay with us. He kept trying to show me how to do these spells…”

“But you can’t do magic outside of Hogwarts,” Hermione protested.

“Oh, yeah…” said Neville, sagging in his seat. “I forgot. But none of them worked, anyway.”

“What spells?” Harry asked, thinking of the spells he had learned over the summer—at least, the legal ones that he could mention. There was the water-repelling charm, the sleeping enchantment, and the dream-induction charm at least, he supposed.

“One was the shield charm,” said Neville.

“Isn’t that advanced?” Harry asked. Harry vaguely recalled seeing some kind of shielding spell in use before, but had not seen it in a textbook yet. Also, given that a key property of the unforgivable curses was that they were magically unblockable, and that spells like the Enemy’s Curse were made to pre-empt shields, Harry wasn’t sure how useful it would be.

“I think it’s a fifth-year spell,” said Hermione.

“Was my dad’s signature. Gran said he could shield a whole squad with one spell,” Neville said, taking out his wand with a forlorn look. He moved it in a perfect circle and said, “ _Protego_.” Nothing happened.

The incantation sounded somewhat familiar to Harry. He frowned, suppressing the urge to try the new spell—he thought it really might actually be too advanced, if it was taught in fifth year, but was afraid to succeed and make Neville feel even worse.

“Maybe you can suggest it for charms club,” Harry said. “Then we could have the upper years help with it.”

“Yeah…” Neville muttered, though he didn’t sound very enthusiastic about it.

“So what exactly does it do?” Hermione asked, leaning forward. “I only briefly read about it. Obviously it shields you from spells, but how?”

“It’s supposed to stop hexes and physical objects,” Neville said. That made sense, Harry thought. Hexes were invariably required to cross the intervening space between caster and target, giving time to block or dodge. That was probably another reason why serious dark wizards seemed to prefer curses.

“Oh and you said your dad liked to use it? What did he do?” Hermione asked. Neville winced, but answered.

“He was an auror,” he said.

They sat dumbly for a few moments, Harry reflecting with panic that Neville’s father had probably been killed on the job by dark wizards. From Hermione’s pale face, she was thinking the same thing.

Wait. The Longbottoms. Hadn’t Barty mentioned the Longbottoms one time to the Dark Lord? Harry felt a little queasy.

Neville chuckled almost convulsively, shoving his wand back into his robe pocket. “So Harry, what about you? Did you do anything fun? Over the summer?”

He couldn’t exactly say, yeah, I took dark magic lessons from your family’s probable murderer and my family’s confirmed murderer. Neither could he shrug and give a vague response after the previous disaster zone their conversation had fallen into, so he settled for the following: “I learned a few nice spells, like the water-repelling charm. It rained a lot.”

Was he really talking about the weather? Hermione did not look impressed, but she played along.

“I’ve read about that one. I’ve been meaning to try it. But are you saying you actually practised spells?” she asked.

“If you cast them while other wizards are around—adults, I mean, no one will know,” Harry informed her.

“But that’s—that’s unfair,” she protested. “So you can all practise at home, but I’d have to go to visit Diagon Alley?”

“Well we’re not supposed to, either,” Harry allowed, but Hermione gave him a withering look that told him exactly how much stock she put into his integrity on that front.

“That changes everything,” she muttered. “I’m probably so behind!”

“Nobody will have been revising,” Harry told her with full confidence. “You’re literally top of our year. That’s not a fluke. Leave some for the rest of us.”

Hermione had the grace to look a little embarrassed.

“Do you think—” Neville began, but was cut off by a knock on the compartment door. Harry glanced out and saw Ron Weasley standing there with a hopeful face. When nobody outright gestured for him to get lost, he entered with a nervous smile.

“All right if I sit here?” he asked, already taking a seat. “Everywhere’s full.”

“It wouldn’t have been if you hadn’t arrived at the last minute,” Hermione admonished.

“There are five of us,” Ron protested. “Mum tries to leave early every time and it never works. Plus Percy wouldn’t stop making a fuss about the car.”

“The car?” Harry asked. Last time he had checked, the Weasleys were pureblood and dirt poor, based on the testimony of Draco Malfoy—‘the worst sort of blood traitors.’ What business did they have with cars?

“It’s this muggle contraption that you ride in,” Ron said, and then Harry had to clarify that of course he knew what a car was, whereupon Ron explained briefly and unenthusiastically about his father’s obsession with muggle artefacts, especially the ones that could move on their own, like cars and aeroplanes. “They give him trouble at work, see, since it’s hard to tell if they’ve been enchanted or not. He works at the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts office.”

“How do you ‘misuse’ a muggle artefact?” Harry asked sceptically. And what even counted as properly muggle? There were things like teapots and mirrors, regular fixtures in the wizarding world, which muggles obviously also had non-enchanted versions of.

“Mainly they mean muggle-baiting, like leaving some jinxed item around where muggles might pick it up,” Ron explained.

“That’s awful,” said Hermione.

“Why would people break the Statute of Secrecy for something stupid like that?” Harry asked, mystified. For some reason, everybody simultaneously shot him strange looks.

Ron shrugged and brought out his wizard’s chess set (arguably also an enchanted muggle artefact, Harry thought) and challenged the compartment at large to a match. Neville volunteered himself with the air of somebody walking to the gallows, and he and Harry switched seats. Hermione buried her face in  _Gadding with Ghouls_ again, leaving Harry to crack open his trunk and pull out  _Blood Brothers_ .

He flipped to a dog-eared page and smoothed down the corner, searching for where he had left off. Admittedly, he had started the book in the Hogwarts library on a whim last year and only managed to vaguely progress through a chapter or two towards the start of the summer, so he was a little lost. On this page, the author seemed to be explaining the arrangement by which his new vampire friends kept themselves fed. Friend appeared to be the correct term here—the author made no mention of exchanging blood, but instead described how one of the vampires would drink his blood daily. Blood-replenishing potion made the process perfectly safe.

The name of this vampire, Sanguini, sounded familiar to Harry. He supposed that since the author of this book was allegedly one of their neighbours, that he lived together with his vampire friend. Still, these people were obviously not part of Silviu’s company. Harry wondered why they were living alone in Britain instead of in Italy.

Reading on, he wrinkled his nose sceptically. The author described the blood donation as ‘mutually beneficial.’ Harry was lost as to what the benefit was to the wizard. He remembered perfectly well this time how it had been painful and messy, and the blood-replenishing potion had tasted awful besides.

Not like Silviu’s blood, he thought a little guiltily. That had been surprisingly palatable.

Harry flipped to the back of the book, looking for some kind of author credentials. Petri  _had_ claimed that the things in this book were supposed to be factual.

‘Eldred Worple is a bestselling wizarding biographer, author of _Lorcan D’Eath: Living Legend_ , _History of the Holyhead Harpies, Minister of Might Millicent Bagnold,_ and many other chronicles of the lives of important witches and wizards of our time. A passionate participant in the community, Eldred enjoys helping underserved members of the population by lending his potion-making skills to those in need and by writing articles to promote their welfare. Exposing misinformation and spreading the truth behind rumours and hearsay is one of his life goals. Eldred lives in London with his partner, Giuseppe.’

Still somewhat dissatisfied, Harry went back to the book. He underlined questionable passages and made notes in the margins. Maybe he should go talk to this Eldred Worple himself and clear up everything once and for all.

“Checkmate,” said Ron, grinning. His face fell when the entire train shuddered and sent a cascade of chess pieces toppling off the board. He dove after them, scrambling to collect the pawns that had rolled under the seat and were screaming for their lives.

Harry snapped his book shut, glancing outside as the train trundled to a halt.

“We can’t be there yet,” Hermione muttered, following his gaze out into the twilit wilderness. “It’s too soon. There wasn’t any announcement.”

Harry shivered and rubbed his arms, noticing suddenly that it was very cold. Another glance at the window told him that it had frosted up. On alert, he stood and took out his wand—something was wrong.

The overhead light winked out, casting them into almost pitch darkness. Neville whimpered.

“Somebody cast the lighting charm,” Harry said when nobody did anything. He had no desire to occupy his own wand when he might need it for more pressing reasons.

“ _Lumos_.” Hermione’s white face was momentarily thrown into stark relief. She turned her wand tip to the floor, waving it back and forth uncertainly. Ron took the moment to snatch up a cursing bishop that had landed by Neville’s foot.

The compartment door slammed open and Hermione’s wand light shot up, revealing a hideous apparition—dreadfully tall and cloaked in a ragged black shroud that revealed hint of slimy grey skin like a quilt of old scabs. A hole opened up in the thing’ s face , and it sucked in a wet, rattling breath. The temperature plummeted. Harry’s vision swam, and when it refocused Hermione’s wand light had sputtered out.

He heard somebody screaming, like they were under the cruciatus curse. An echo of that pain stirred somewhere in his chest, sending a shudder through his body. The Dark Lord’s red eyes flashed in his mind’s eye.

_It’s not real_ , he thought, recognising the wave of memory that was trying to drag him under. Don’t think. Don’t think.

He held his breath and stared up at the abomination in the door. That was real. This was not. The thing reached out with a nebulous limb. Its misty sleeve rolled back a little, exposing a hand, skeletal and covered with that same horrendous skin.

Don’t think. Don’t feel. Somewhere, somebody was screaming, but it was faint and distant.

Numbly, Harry scrutinised the hand. It inched forward. The thing was leaning down. It was reaching over. Harry glanced down and saw Neville slumped on the seat, eyes wide open but unseeing. The hand touched the unresponsive boy’s face.

Harry didn’t think. His wand came up and his body surged with desperation. “ _Inimico!_ ”

Searing blue light flashed through the compartment, striking the creature in the door. It jerked slightly, proving that it was corporeal, and Harry saw its flesh warp and bubble. It withdrew its hand from Neville, but did not leave or show any sign of discomfort. On the contrary, the hand now began to reach for Harry instead.

Harry lost his grip on his thoughts as panic and confusion wrestled for supremacy. He gasped for breath and his hand slackened, leaving his wand to roll on the floor.

_No!_ What was he doing? He tried to crouch down and recover it, but his body didn’t seem to be listening to him. Screams filled his ears, accompanied by a countermelody of horribly familiar laughter, and ephemeral flashes of sickly green spellfire exploded behind his eyelids like fireworks.

“Please!” somebody was begging—a woman. He had to help her. “Not Harry!”

Not him? The creature’s clammy hand cupped his face. It opened its mouth and inhaled once more.

Paradoxically, Harry felt a little calmer, and managed to grab hold of his wits again. He breathed in and out. Despite the creature’s mouldering appearance, its smell was not unpleasant, reminiscent of rotting leaves and grave dirt  on a rainy evening . It cocked its head, almost as if confused, and its other hand came up. Harry tried to get away, but there was nowhere to go—he was backed against the side of the train already, and the creature’s grip was unbreakable.

It was stroking his face. Harry blinked, choking down his revulsion and trying to breathe steadily as its bony, frigid fingers mapped the contour of his jaw. The creature’s skin was still cracking and peeling under the influence of the enemy’s curse, black ichor leaking sluggishly from its wounds but quickly solidifying into a sticky mass almost indistinguishable from the rest of its scabby body.

With sudden alacrity, the creature gripped his shoulders with both hands and leaned in. Harry was frozen with horror. Its lipless mouth met his clammy forehead, and an image exploded forcefully in his mind—freezing rain, pelting against a tiny sliver of a window, long and too narrow to even wedge a hand through—a pockmarked, emaciated face, twisted into a grimace. He knew that face, could not help recognising it, and in an instant Malfoy Manor’s carpet came to mind, Rookwood still in the guise of an old man grovelling there, gasping for breath in the aftermath of the cruciatus, the taste of his relief so sweet and tender in the wake of tantalising agony and despair. Harry shuddered convulsively, drawing in a deep lungful of air and… something more.

He jerked away like he’d been splashed with ice water. The creature let him go, suddenly losing interest and floating out of the compartment. Light and warmth returned to their surroundings as the trailing end of its cloak disappeared down the corridor, but Harry still felt stiff and frigid. He leaned back heavily against his seat and the wall. The others did not look much better than he felt, all pale and shivering.

“That was awful,” Neville whispered in a high voice, cold sweat streaming down his face. “Harry, are you all right? It—it touched you.”

“I’m fine,” Harry said. Perhaps alarmingly, he was not feeling much of anything at all. It was like he had been hollowed out, and his insides had been replaced with ice.

“What do you reckon that thing was?” Ron asked. His ears had reddened, and by the by the rest of him seemed to be warming up as well. Harry stared at his own hand, which still looked bloodless.

“Dementor,” he muttered, reasonably sure of this answer.

“Right, a dementor is a robed spectre whose aura induces hopelessness and despair by draining hope and happiness out of the air. They feed on emotions, especially negative ones, and their aura is icy cold…” Hermione muttered, going on to recite the rest of the entry straight out of _The Dark Forces: A Guide to Self-Protection._

Harry thawed out a little, enough to get up shakily to recover his wand, which had rolled under the seat and was covered with dust. Even though the temperature had by now gone up to normal, he pointed it at himself and made a zigzag, muttering, “ _Calesco._ ” A warm stream of air blasted his face.

He frowned.

“Are you all still cold?” he asked, rubbing at his chest. His robes were toasty from the charm, but the skin beneath remained icy.

Hermione and Ron shook their heads. Neville shrugged. “I think it’s getting better,” he said.

Well, none of them had been touched by the dementor like he had. In fact, it had even given him a kiss of sorts—not  _the_ kiss, which Harry was pretty sure was administered to the mouth, and which obviously would have left him incapable of having these thoughts in the first place—but something more than its passive aura. It had sort of been like legilimency, only indescribably more awful.

The train rattled, coming back to life and resuming the journey like nothing had happened. Hermione stood up and crossed the compartment, shoving the door open and sticking her head outside, where the corridor lights had been restored. Harry peered over her shoulder and saw dozens of other pale students filtering outside, their low voices melding together indistinctly.

“…Dementors… doing here… Azkaban… mad…”

“I’m going to go find the prefects,” Hermione declared, pushing her way through the crowd. Harry shut the compartment door after here and sat back down to wait, massaging his chest.

“Do you think they’re really gone?” Neville asked in a small voice.

“We’re moving again, and the lights are on, so I hope so,” Harry said. Despite everything, the dementors didn’t seem to have eaten anybody—nobody was screaming bloody murder—so they had probably come on the train with orders of some kind.

Hermione returned and confirmed his guesses.

“It was a surprise search. They were looking for the Azkaban escapees,” she informed them, shuddering. “Urgh. They were really horrible, though.”

“They couldn’t have sent aurors?” Ron demanded, but nobody had an answer for him.

The atmosphere as they pulled into Hogsmeade was subdued. Hermione pointed to the right, where an unfamiliar, extremely ancient man was swinging a lantern on a great walking stick that seemed many times too big for him.

“First years, over here! Gather round! First years!” he called out in a creaky voice.

“Oh, I feel so bad for the first years,” Hermione muttered. “Dementors on their first day.”

Harry nodded. That probably wasn’t the best first impression of Hogwarts.

They followed the rest of the returning students up the hill to where the thestral-drawn carriages were waiting. As the carriages trundled up to the gates, a familiar chill descended upon them once more. Harry gripped his wand tightly, but the feeling soon passed as they entered Hogwarts proper.

Madam Pomfrey was waiting for the students in the entry hall, disbursing something—medicine? When she came to their group, Harry received his allotment and discovered that it was a square of chocolate.

“Eat up,” Madam Pomfrey ordered, moving swiftly down the loose queue of students, “Dementors at the school, Merlin. What are they thinking? Anybody experience an adverse reaction? Ongoing chills?”

Harry’s hand, which had been tracing circles around his heart, paused. He waved to Madam Pomfrey, whose eyes lit up in recognition. He groaned internally. Of course she knew him as a patient, never mind about whether he was Harry Potter.

“Eat your chocolate,” she admonished, when she approached and saw his untouched square. Harry shoved it into his mouth, chewing vigorously. The intensely sweet flavour stuck to his throat as he swallowed, and warmth spread throughout his body, but his heart remained frigid.

“Still cold here,” he told her, tapping his chest. Madam Pomfrey pulled him aside, and he tried to protest. “It’s probably nothing—I can wait after dinner.” He still remembered last year, when he had missed half the feast because of his stupid garlic allergy.

“Young man, dementor exposure can be a serious matter,” Madam Pomfrey told him with a severe look, waving her wand at him. “How long did you spend near them?”

“Maybe a minute? One came into our compartment and kind of grabbed me,” Harry said, indicating his chin. “Then it put its face on my face.” He didn’t want to use the word ‘kiss,’ given its alarming connotation.

Madam Pomfrey did not look happy to hear this at all. She passed him an entire block of chocolate that must have weighed a kilogram, and then pulled a grey potion out of her robe pocket.

“Take this,” she said. “Pepper-up.”

Harry drank the potion, gritting his teeth at the peppery taste. Steam shot out of his ears. He thought he felt a little warmer.

“Eat at least a square of chocolate every morning and evening until your symptoms disappear,” she said. “Come see me if your skin still feels cold to the touch, or if you are still having persistent nightmares after a week.”

“Right, thanks Madam Pomfrey,” he said, hurrying out of her grasp and towards the Great Hall. Nightmares—great. He pushed through the few students who were still loitering about in wait for Madam Pomfrey’s attention and managed to catch up to the stragglers filtering through the gigantic doors. He slipped over to the end of the Ravenclaw table, and Terry scooted over forcefully to make room for him.

A few minutes after he took his seat, Professor McGonagall led the first years inside. They looked tiny and nervous—had Harry looked so lost last year? In the back, a small blond boy had hair that was almost standing on end, like he had recently been subject to a strong hot-air charm. Perhaps he had fallen into the lake.

Somebody cleared their throat. Harry glanced to his right and realised that it was the Sorting Hat, which opened up its ‘mouth’ and began to sing. Harry listened on curiously—it was a different tune from the one the previous year, slower and less upbeat, and had different words too, he was sure:

_My bearing may be dreadfully plain,_

_From hasty judgment you’ll please refrain_

_For judgment is my purpose tonight_

_Ordained by those four wizards of might_

_Fierce Gryffindor, intrepid and bold,_

_His exploits famed in ballads of old,_

_Sharp Slytherin, ever victorious,_

_His deeds concealed but no less glorious,_

_Shrewd Ravenclaw, both clever and wise,_

_Her knowledge endless as seas and skies,_

_Kind Hufflepuff, honest and steadfast,_

_Her loyalty ever unsurpassed._

  
  


_Students they chose in sensible ways,_

_The ones who showed the traits they would praise,_

_But after their time how would they choose?_

_Gryffindor knew just the thing to use._

_He snatched me gallantly from his head_

_His trusty hat, and afterwards said:_

_A bit of fluff, some magical stuff,_

_From each of us will be just enough._

_From here on out hear the Sorting Hat,_

_It will sort our students—that was that!_

The hall broke out into polite applause. Professor McGonagall unfurled her scroll and began to read off names. Harry clapped absently as “Allen, Michelle” was sorted into Ravenclaw. His stomach grumbled—he had completely forgotten to pack himself lunch for the train, and was starving. The chocolate had only served to whet his appetite. He rubbed at his chest, and then patted restlessly at the pocket where he had slipped the rest of his prescribed chocolate block. It wasn’t like he could take it out now.

Harry glanced up at the head table and confirmed Lockhart’s presence. He was dressed in fuchsia and black striped robes with a matching broad-brimmed feather hat and beamed widely at the students below. In short, he looked perfectly normal. Harry wondered if he should notify Dumbledore somehow that the man was under the imperius curse. Would that be acting too directly against Lord Voldemort?

The sorting ended with “Weasley, Ginevra” going to Gryffindor, and the headmaster stood up.

“Welcome, new students, and to those returning, welcome back. I know your stomachs are all excited for the main event, so I shan’t keep them waiting too long. I just wanted to share a little joke. A goblin, a hag, and a centaur walk into a bar—”

“Albus!” Professor McGonagall admonished.

“Ah, yes, Professor McGonagall is quite right. Now is not the best time… perhaps after the feast.” With that, Professor Dumbledore clapped his hands, and the golden platters filled to the brim with buttered vegetables, glistening roasts, and savoury pies. Harry reached carefully for some potatoes, on which he could clearly see finely minced garlic. The platter scuttled away from his hand. Confident that he wasn’t about to suffer an embarrassing reaction for the second year in a row, he turned to some more friendly dishes.

“What do you reckon that joke was going to be?” Anthony asked.

“Dunno, but I’ve got a good one,” Terry said. “Two wizards walk into a bar. The first one drinks some firewhiskey and brings his mate outside. ‘Watch this, mate,’ he says and jumps off a cliff, floating all the way down to the bottom. His friend asks him, ‘how’d you do that?’ and he tells him he used the feather-light charm. Well his friend goes running back into the bar, buys himself a firewhiskey, casts the charm, and jumps right off the cliff, breaking his leg. The bartender says, ‘I was wondering why he put the feather-light charm on his drink.’”

“That’s not even funny,” Lisa said with a severe expression as she cut into a diricawl leg and took a delicate bite. “And can you even feather-light charm _yourself?_ That would sort of be like flying, but you can’t fly unsupported.”

“It’s not flying, because you’d still fall,” Terry pointed out. A summer without heated arguments over trivial matters had apparently been too much for the both of them, because Lisa immediately launched into a lengthy retort.

“That charm might not be flight, but it works the same way as a whole bunch of other charms. If you could cast feather-light on yourself, then the others should also work…”

Anthony leaned back to roll his eyes exaggeratedly behind Terry.

“So, how was your summer?” he asked Harry.

“It was fine. How was yours?” Harry mumbled, pretending to be occupied with his peas. Anthony seemed more than happy to tell about his own holiday.

“Brilliant. I went to New York to visit some relatives, and we got to ride on an aeroplane. It took forever to get there, but it was loads better than an international portkey, ‘cause I didn’t want to throw up after, and we went way up above the clouds. The food in New York was amazing—I thought Hogwarts feasts were good, and I mean, they are, but that was something else.”

Harry thought back to his own dismal home food with some envy. Rosenkol had been trying, so he could hardly blame the elf, and Harry had made progress of his own, but neither of them had got as far as even an average house elf in skill.

“Have you ever been to America?” Anthony asked. Harry shook his head. “Out of the country?”

“Germany,” Harry said vaguely, stuffing his face with a buttery crust of bread to avoid elaborating. Anthony turned to his other side and began repeating his story to Oliver.

Harry glanced over to the Hufflepuff table, trying to find Hannah’s sandy head in the crowd. At length, he spotted her sitting all the way towards the other end. Disappointed, he turned behind him in search of Vince. The boy was predictably sitting beside Draco, but where Goyle, on his other side, was shovelling mash into his mouth straight from a serving tureen, Vince was only picking at his food. A little concerned, Harry waved at him and tried to catch his eye, but only got Draco’s attention instead.

The blond boy gave him a reserved nod before looking away. Frustrated, Harry returned to his own meal, listening to the conversations around him with half an ear and finding none of them salient. Across from him, Mandy and Sue were commiserating about how awful the dementors had been. Harry agreed completely but felt that it would be better to keep his strange interaction to himself.

He looked around for Penelope, who had been made president of charms club at the end of the last term—he wanted to ask when the first meeting would be, and whether she would be handing out new membership sheets or reusing Elaine’s set. His eyes caught on Cho, who was laughing uproariously, probably at something Marietta had said. The candlelight glinted dazzlingly across her cascade of straight black hair and her long lashes fluttered as she giggled. There was a smear of sauce at the corner of her lip. As he watched, her tongue darted out to lick it away. Her throat bobbed as she swallowed.

Harry turned away quickly, the curve of Cho’s smile still imprinted on the backs of his eyelids as he picked up his fork and prodded at a few straggling green beans on his plate. Before he could decide whether he really wanted to eat them, they vanished, and an enormous variety of sweets and confections appeared before him instead. The mouthwatering, cloying scent of treacle wafted up to his nose. He helped himself to a generous slice of tart, which he washed down with pumpkin juice.

All too soon, the feast was over, and Harry felt liable to explode at any minute. The afters disappeared, and Professor Dumbledore stood up to make a proper speech.

He did not finish his joke after all, but instead spoke with perfect sobriety. “Now that we are all fed and watered, I have a few announcements to make before we can all retire to our beds. We have some changes to our staff this year. Firstly, Hogwarts’ new keeper of keys and gamekeeper is an old friend who has generously agreed to return while we search for a more permanent appointment. Please welcome, or rather, welcome back, Mr Ogg!”

Dumbledore clapped loudly and enthusiastically, and everybody else followed belatedly. The ancient man who had brought the first years up to the castle stood up, grinning toothlessly.

“Next, we are pleased to welcome your new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, Professor Lockhart,” Dumbledore said.

Lockhart surged to his feet and flashed his award-winning smile. An audible sigh passed across the hall, followed by a wave of hearty applause. Harry looked around and saw an alarming number of girls smiling very dreamily up at the head table. He exchanged a glance with Terry, who looked equally despairing, and then his gaze slid over to Lisa, who blinked at him guilelessly from beneath her thin fringe. At least she hadn’t gone mad too.

“Thank you, thank you! You are all very lucky to be living in these times, for you are about to experience the best Defence Against the Dark Arts instructor in Hogwarts’ illustrious history. I am simply delighted for the opportunity to share my tricks with you, alongside my esteemed colleagues,” Lockhart declared. Harry blinked at this very… promotional statement. The other professors looked uncomfortable—Professor Snape was openly glowering, and even the usually jovial Professor Flitwick seemed embarrassed.

Professor Dumbledore coughed. “Yes, I’m sure Professor Lockhart’s instruction will be like nothing any of us has ever seen before. Now, to reiterate a few school rules. I would like to remind everybody that magic is not permitted in the corridors, and that the Forbidden Forest remains, as its name suggests, forbidden to students. Likewise, there is an extensive list of items which are also forbidden at Hogwarts. For a complete enumeration, please refer to Mr Filch. Finally, in light of the recent escape of highly dangerous persons from Azkaban prison, dementors will be stationed around the perimeter of the school for additional security. I must entreat you all to take their presence very seriously. They will not take kindly to any unauthorised attempts to leave or enter the castle grounds and will not be hoodwinked by ordinary means such as confounding charms or invisibility cloaks.”

He paused to gaze solemnly around the hall, and Harry had the uncomfortable feeling that Dumbledore was looking right at him as he said those last words, though of course he must have just imagined it. When Harry looked up again, the lines on the headmaster’s face had softened and his eyes had regained their grandfatherly twinkle. 

“Now then, I am sure that you are all nodding off in your seats by now and have no desire to hear more of an old man’s prattle. Off to bed with you all. Chop chop!” He clapped his hands twice and sat back down, and the prefects sprang to their feet, calling for their houses to follow them.

Now that he was in motion and forced to make his way up so many flights of stairs, Harry realised how tired he really was. The heavy meal had not helped. He barely managed to keep to the pack of Ravenclaws, let alone get a hold of Penelope, and in the end gave up and  followed the rest of his dorm mates up the tallest tower,  collapsing into his bed.


	44. Rescuer

"Draco," Harry yelled, sprinting to catch up with the Slytherin as they streamed out of Professor McGonagall's classroom. Draco did not stop walking, though he slowed somewhat.

"What?" he muttered.

"Where's Vince?" Harry asked, nodding to Goyle and then to the empty space on Draco's left side. "I haven't seen him since the feast."

This state of affairs was highly irregular, as they had just had the first lesson of term. Vince was no model student, but last year he had managed to show up to lessons, at the very least.

"He's sleeping in," said Draco.

"Is he ill?" Harry asked. Draco shrugged.

"I'm not his mum," he said.

"You're supposed to be his friend," Harry pointed out. "Look, can you just… ask him if he's okay?"

"Fine, fine," said Draco, looking at him askance. He then glanced back over his shoulder, and pressed his lips together firmly. "Actually, if you're so concerned, maybe you should talk to him yourself. I think something may have happened over the summer. Something big, with my parents and his. They stayed over with us for a while. You didn't notice anything strange when you came over to my manor, did you?"

Harry pressed his lips together. "No. Not really," he said. Nothing strange about the Dark Lord at all.

"Well of course you wouldn't have… you've only been once," Draco muttered. "Forget I said anything."

"Fine," Harry agreed, thinking that he would surely see for himself what state Vince was in during Potions, which they had at eleven.

But Vince did not show up to Potions either. Professor Snape's eyes flashed dangerously when he had to call his name twice while taking register, and still received no response.

"This year, I have the misfortune of instructing you in a variety of volatile potions," Professor Snape drawled, stepping out from behind his desk with his hands folded behind his back. "In the vain hope of preventing any irreversible disasters, I will be lecturing on the week's potion in advance of the practical lesson. If you value your limbs, I suggest you pay close attention."

He waved his wand, and two potion names appeared on the board in bulky letters: 'Swelling Solution' and 'Deflating Draught'.

"Who can tell me what a volatile potion is?" Professor Snape asked, his dark eyes sweeping across the room. The usual suspects were, of course, ready to jump on the question, but Snape liked to pick on the students who looked least prepared. "Weasley!"

Next to Ron, who had suddenly turned very pale, Hermione was vibrating in her seat. She had learned not to raise her hand unbidden in Professor Snape's lessons, but her lowered arm did nothing to hide that she was desperately holding herself back from blurting out the answer. Snape ignored her with practised ease, his piercing gaze narrowing in on his chosen victim.

"It's a potion… that works really fast?" Ron said, which was almost half right. Harry was impressed by his guessing skills.

Professor Snape seemed almost disappointed at this run-of-the-mill poor answer—perhaps he had been expecting something more egregiously wrong—and quietly corrected him: "A volatile potion comes into effect instantly upon contact with sufficient external magic, leaving no residue. Longbottom! What causes a potion to be volatile rather than settled?"

Neville opened his mouth. Nothing came out for a few moments, but then he rubbed at his wrist and screwed up his face, finally managing, "It's the—the timing of the magic you put in. You have to do it at the start. For a volatile potion."

Professor Snape didn't sneer, instead moving on immediately, which Harry thought ought to be taken as a very high compliment. He felt warm pride in his chest for Neville, who had obviously been studying with his remembrall. They were not banned in lessons, only exams, but it would probably still be awkward to be seen using one. Fortunately, the wristband Harry had sent him for his birthday would let Neville access his remembrall's functions more subtly.

Harry's own 'remembrand' had not seen much use. He wasn't even wearing it at the moment, an oversight which he reminded himself to correct post-haste. It had been unnecessary to have it for the sort of practical necromancy and enchanting he had been up to all summer, but would be indispensable in theoretical lessons.

Snape asked a few more questions, selecting some unlucky Hufflepuffs to humiliate, before he began to lecture in earnest.

"Once activated, the Swelling Solution causes uniform inflation of anything it touches. The extent of the inflation is approximately a two-fold increase per standard beaker. This inflation is _not_ an enlargement—the target will be stretched out. That means that an excess amount of Swelling Solution will cause injury to a living target, though regrettably, nothing that a competent wizard cannot fix."

Harry's quill paused, injecting the parchment with a dark blot of ink. What did Snape mean 'regrettably'? He glanced around but nobody else seemed to find this funny—Hannah was doodling an elaborate bird in the margin of her potions book and Stephen was staring into space.

"This brings us to the counter to the Swelling Solution, namely the Deflating Draught," Professor Snape said. He tapped his wand on the blackboard and text enumerating the properties of the Swelling Solution appeared. Harry scrambled to copy it down.

"The Deflating Draught is specifically designed to achieve the opposite effect of the Swelling Solution. Both potions use the same base ingredients, but differ in the adjuvant. Cornfoot—based on this information, what could be the last ingredient in the Deflating Draught?"

Professor Snape rarely called on Stephen, who seemed to have an answer for everything, so Harry knew it was a hard question. He was certainly stumped.

Stephen shifted in his seat, dropping his hand from his chin to his desk lazily. "Since the last ingredient in the Swelling Solution is bat spleen, which is an inflammatory agent, and its effect is amplified by the pufferfish eyes, the Deflating Draught needs something anti-inflammatory… I would say newt tail, sir."

Professor Snape nodded once. "Five points to Ravenclaw. The recipe in your textbook will list the final ingredient as powdered chameleon spine, but newt tail would do just as well in this draught. Versatility is the mark of a competent potioneer. Then again, the mediocre would be better-served if they could simply follow instructions."

Here, Snape glanced back to the Gryffindors, his eyes lingering meaningfully on Hermione, who had no doubt been prepared with the textbook answer.

Professor Snape spent the rest of the lesson on the Deflating Draught, which they would be brewing in next week's practical. Though the potion had only three ingredients, Harry already foresaw it being tricky, with all the stirring work involved. For some reason, the way Harry stirred was still not exactly right—even if he followed the instructions properly and did not miscount, his potions never ended up as vibrant as Stephen's work. The other boy had tried to give him advice on technique, but no matter how Harry changed his grip or straightened his back, something was still off.

He still got E's on his practical work, however, so Harry supposed he shouldn't complain. At least he had never melted any cauldrons.

Professor Snape assigned them ten inches on the proper storage of volatile potions and immediately stalked out of the classroom with purpose. By the time Harry made his way outside amid the throng of students, the professor was nowhere to be seen. Harry wondered if he had used a time turner.

"I'm starving," Terry moaned as they exited the dungeons. Fortunately, the Great Hall was just around the corner, and by the savoury scents wafting from the open doors, lunch was already in progress.

"Your fault for skipping breakfast," said Anthony.

"I couldn't fall asleep last night. I was just lying awake in bed for ages," Terry protested.

"What, sleep too much on the train?" Anthony asked.

"No," Terry muttered, running his hand through his hair. "I think it was the dementors. I was feeling out of it all night."

"Awful monsters," Anthony agreed. Harry tapped his chest, checking if it was still cold. He had forgotten to take his prescribed chocolate, but it seemed like the lingering chill had faded anyway. He hadn't had any nightmares or trouble sleeping, though his dreams _had_ been very vivid. He remembered torrential rain and dark stone, but not much else.

"It's a conspiracy to turn school into even more of a prison," said Terry, pausing by their usual spot at the Ravenclaw table. It seemed to already be occupied by some first years.

"Hey, budge up," said Terry, making a shooing motion to a redheaded girl, who glared darkly at him. Paying her no mind, Terry crammed himself into the space between her and a studying seventh year before turning around, arms haughtily folded behind his head. He glanced expectantly to Anthony and Harry to help him with his conquest of the table.

Harry shot him a smirk and sat down on the first year girl's other side. He turned to her, ready to introduce himself, when he realised that they had met before. It was Ginny Weasley, Ron's sister. He dithered for a moment, wondering if she remembered him.

"You're a Gryffindor," Terry told her, finally noticing the red and gold patch on her robes.

"Five points to Ravenclaw for stating the obvious," said Ginny, tossing her hair over her shoulder.

"You sound like Snape," Terry grumbled.

"No. Snape would have said five points _from_ Ravenclaw," Ginny said, grinning. Anthony laughed and clapped Terry on the back.

"Mate, she doesn't sound like Snape, she sounds like Lisa," he said.

"Who sounds like me?"

Of course, Lisa had chosen that moment to catch up to them. Ginny jumped to her feet and stuck out her hand.

"Ginny Weasley, at your service," she said.

"Lisa Turpin." She shook Ginny's hand. "Were you just telling Terry that he's wrong? He needs constant reminding."

"Hey!"

Lisa raised an eyebrow, and Terry slumped. Smirking, she ducked underneath the table and emerged on the other side. Ginny laughed in delight at this manoeuvre, but the second years had seen it often enough to pay it no mind. Ravenclaws were lazy, and lazy people preferred shortcuts.

"Hello," said the small blonde first year across from them as Lisa popped up. Unlike Ginny, she was actually at the correct house table, and like a proper Ravenclaw, was reading over her food.

"Oh!" said Ginny, taking her seat again. She pointed to the other girl. "This is Luna. I have no idea who any of you are except Lisa. It's rude not to introduce yourselves."

Anthony and Terry mumbled their names and Lisa snickered openly.

"I'm Harry," said Harry, who decided he had nothing to be embarrassed about. He ladled himself some pea soup.

"Like Harry Potter," said Ginny, and Harry blinked, because he was sure that she had said the exact same thing once before. She seemed to realise the same thing, for her eyes widened and she snapped her fingers. "Right, Harry, I knew I'd seen you before. Your dad runs that shop in _Knockturn Alley_." She said the last part in a stage whisper.

"My uncle," Harry corrected, feeling a twinge of automatic revulsion at the thought of Petri being in any way associated with his father.

"Knockturn Alley, really?" asked Terry, leaning in. "I didn't know that. That's wicked."

"Not really," said Harry, shrinking back a little as he noticed everybody in the vicinity peering at him.

"What's it like there?" Terry asked. "Mum won't let me even get near the entrance, but I heard you can get all kinds of good stuff there."

Harry made a face. "You mean, cursed rubbish," he said, thinking of Borgin and Burke's. He shoved his spoon in his mouth so he wouldn't have to say more.

Anyway, Ginny seemed more than happy to recount her experience in Petri's shop. She made getting scammed sound like some kind of grand adventure.

"That's where I got you your Christmas present," she told Luna.

The blonde girl lowered the periodical she was reading and dutifully produced her odd-eye glass.

 _Free advertising,_ came the unbidden thought to Harry, and he scowled. Petri was rubbing off on him far too much.

"It's very useful. If you look very closely, you can guess if somebody's got a wrackspurt in their head," Luna said, pressing the glass up to her face and peering all around. Her eye was magnified to grotesque proportions, grey and watery.

"What's a wrackspurt?" asked Anthony.

"Don't even ask," said Ginny, rolling her eyes. "Just go along with it."

"Wrackspurts aren't good for you," Luna explained anyway. "They're mites that go in your head and make your brain all fuzzy."

"What do they look like?" Harry asked, suddenly concerned. Every day he seemed to be learning about new mind-altering horrors.

"They're invisible," Luna said, frowning. She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, revealing a bulbous earring that looked remarkably like a fresh radish.

"Can you detect them? How do you stop them?" Harry asked, dropping his spoon into his soup with a plop. Terry snickered.

"Mate, there's no such thing," he said. Harry's stomach flipped. Was he being gullible, or was Terry just being ignorant? He glanced to Lisa, who looked on with pursed lips. The fact that she wasn't leaping at the opportunity for argument was perhaps evidence enough. Harry narrowed his eyes at the first year, Luna. She stared back with no trace of guile in her face.

"Wrackspurts are attracted to boring thoughts," she said, her gaze still fixed on Harry. "If you want to avoid them, you have to keep your mind open."

Keeping your mind open sounded like a counterintuitive way to prevent a mental attack. Harry kept his opinion to himself, however, and returned to his soup. Luna put her odd-eye glass away and buried herself in her magazine again.

Right. The odd-eye glass. It was just a toy, and certainly not a dark creature detector of any kind. Perhaps wrackspurts were fanciful, after all. Thoughts of the glass reminded him about Vince, and he glanced over to the Slytherin table. He found Draco and Goyle quickly enough, but again, there was no sign of Vince. Harry had never known the boy to skip a meal.

He finished his food quickly and excused himself, hurrying around the end of the long table.

"Before you ask, I haven't seen Vince," Draco drawled as he approached. "He wasn't in our dorm after Potions."

"Where could he be then?" Harry demanded. "Hospital wing?"

Draco shrugged. "That would make sense, wouldn't it?"

That was true enough, which was why Harry immediately stalked out of the Great Hall and headed straight for the next staircase up.

"Wait!"

Harry heard the clatter of silverware and the rustling of robes. Draco had hurried after him. Harry glanced back and saw Goyle trailing behind, clutching an armful of pasties.

"It's probably just a cold. Dolt must not have packed any Pepperup," Draco said, though his dismissive words failed to hide the tone of concern in his voice.

"What if it's spattergroit? Or dragon pox?" Goyle asked slowly.

"Don't say things like that!" Draco hissed, all the blood running from his already pale face.

But when they finally made it to the infirmary, they discovered that Vince wasn't there at all. They hadn't asked, of course—they weren't stupid _—_ instead, Harry had gone in on his own and done a survey of the ward, using his glasses to peer through the privacy curtains and ascertain that there were no patients resembling their heavyset friend.

Madam Pomfrey had come out immediately to meet him, but Harry was armed with an excuse.

"Madam Pomfrey, at the end of last term you said I should come ask you if I felt symptoms, like tiredness, that would mean I needed blood," he said, and it was such an awkward topic anyway that he hardly felt like he was lying.

"Yes, that's right. I'm glad you've come to me before the craving was too severe," said Madam Pomfrey as she opened up a medicine cabinet and scrolled through its seemingly endless shelves with her wand. Finally, she plucked out a handful of vials full of unmistakable red liquid and handed them to Harry.

"Where exactly is this from?" Harry asked, a little concerned. He knew that muggles had blood donations for the hospital, but saw no reason why wizards would need the same thing when they had blood-replenishing potion. Also, given that a wizard's blood could be used to do all manner of unsavoury dark magic, it seemed like it would be a bad idea for anybody to simply hand theirs out.

"Don't worry," Madam Pomfrey said with a knowing smile, "The house elves donate it for cases like yours, or for students who react badly to blood-replenishing potion."

Unable to help himself, Harry uncorked one of the vials and sniffed it. This was house elf blood? It looked and smelled the same as any other. Saliva pooled in his mouth and he swallowed hastily and drew the vial away from his face. "I thought you told me that vampires can only drink human blood."

"Part-human blood will also do," Madam Pomfrey assured him. This only raised more questions, however. House elves counted as part-human? Harry did not like the implications. "The important thing is the magic content. Vampires need it to survive. You do not require it, but the vampire curse compels you to drink it regardless. Am I correct in assuming that you're part-vampire?"

"Yeah… how did you know?" Harry asked, thrown. He was sure he hadn't mentioned this story to Madam Pomfrey before, and that he had honestly told her about being bitten.

"You said that you were only bitten once—part-vampires are much more sensitive to the vampire curse than ordinary wizards. One bite is enough to cause a variety of symptoms that would normally only appear after multiple attacks," Madam Pomfrey explained.

"Oh." Harry frowned. That was good to know, and convenient, but didn't make much sense in light of the truth. Silviu had said that he had never seen a case like Harry's. If the vampire curse were simply at some later stage that normally appeared after repeated bites, surely he would have recognised it?

Madam Pomfrey nodded. "And are you still feeling any lingering cold from the dementors?"

"No," said Harry. "Thanks for the chocolate. And the blood."

"Very good. Come back if you need anything, though I hope not to have to see you here again," Madam Pomfrey said, giving him a kind smile. Harry tried to smile back as he took his leave, but he was too preoccupied by what she had told him. He slipped the vials of elf blood into his pocket, where they clattered against the block of chocolate that he had forgotten to eat. It was his snack pocket now, he supposed.

"Well, is he there?" Draco demanded in a hushed voice as he rounded the first stretch of spiral staircase. Harry shook his head. "What took you so long then?"

"I had to pretend to be sick, didn't I? Madam Pomfrey looked me over and gave me some potions," Harry lied.

"Where do you reckon he could be?" Draco muttered. "I thought you were overreacting before, but I'm beginning to think you're right. This isn't normal—something's up with Vince for sure."

"I have no idea," Harry said. "The castle's huge. He could be anywhere."

Even as he those words passed his lips, he thought of the spare classroom that he and his friends used as a study space. He dismissed the thought. Why on earth would _Vince_ skive off lessons and miss meals in order to go study? That made no sense at all.

"Do you know any tracking charms?" Draco asked.

"No. We could go to the library," Harry said, but Draco rolled his eyes.

"We've got History in half an hour. He'll turn up eventually, right?" he said. "Then we can interrogate him."

Harry didn't like the thought of waiting around when they could be doing something, but acknowledged the point about their History lesson and followed Draco down the stairs.

Professor Binns had no concept of the fact that it was the first lesson of the year. He simply dove into his lecture as always, with no introduction whatsoever. Harry dutifully made notes about the third goblin uprising of the twelfth century and tried not to fall into a stupor.

Like a number of other goblin rebellions they had covered, this one had been over property rights. Goblins did not believe in commerce or inheritance, despite the fact they ran a bank. In their eyes, magical items belonged to those who had crafted them, and while it was permissible to borrow items with the creator's direct consent, transferring those items to others was tantamount to theft. Wizards obviously believed otherwise, which led to great discontent over perceived malfeasance from both sides.

Perhaps it was because they lived for a very long time—the oldest goblin was rumoured to be over a millennium old—but goblins were inflexible as a rule, and trust between goblins and wizards as thin as the parchments on which their short-lived treaties were inscribed. It was only the fact that both races had astonishingly complementary magics that made tenuous cooperation possible. Or rather, neither could ever successfully exterminate the other, as wizards had unparalleled offensive capabilities on the battlefield while goblins could create impenetrable defences. In the end this put goblins at the disadvantage of being under what was essentially constant siege, but allowed them to survive there indefinitely.

Harry wondered why everybody seemed to hate each other. Wizards and goblins hated each other, vampires and goblins hated each other, wizards hated vampires and hags and other dark creatures—actually, it seemed like wizards hated all kinds of non-wizards.

There was no satisfactory answer. The way Professor Binns told it, history had simply happened without rhyme or reason. Goblins rebelled and were quelled. Dark wizards terrorised nations but inevitably fell before heroes or rivals. The stories of how anybody had gained notoriety in the first place remained untold.

Wrist numb from copying down the dates and outcomes of ancient battles that nobody cared about, Harry slowly capped his inkwell and shoved it into his bookbag, sandwiched inside a scroll of parchment. History was the last lesson of the day, so he was in no hurry.

"Hey," said Hannah, coming up to his desk with a hopeful face. "Want to work on Snape's essay?"

Harry grimaced. He wanted to look for Vince. Actually, these two things were not mutually exclusive.

"Sure. Should we get Neville and—have you seen Vince at all?" he asked, as if he were not fully aware of the boy's absence all morning long.

Hannah glanced around the classroom, but there were only some Gryffindor and Hufflepuff stragglers left. Harry waved to Neville, who shuffled over, blinking blearily at them.

"Hi Neville. We were going to go work on the essay for Potions," Hannah told him. "Have you seen Vince?"

Neville shrugged. "He won't want to work on it yet anyway. It was just assigned this morning."

"Good point," said Hannah. "Let's go then."

She ran off, and Harry and Neville shared a commiserating look. Though Harry was the Ravenclaw in their group, Hannah undoubtedly had the best study habits of them all. Perhaps that wasn't so surprising—it took Hufflepuff diligence to stay on top of homework so persistently.

Neville glanced back with a frown, and Harry followed his gaze to see Hermione still sitting by herself at a desk, apparently reading over her notes. After a moment's hesitation, Neville turned away and hurried after Hannah. Harry knew what he was thinking. Hermione was a walking textbook, but it was hard to study with her. Asking her a question yielded the answer plus a dozen supplemental facts nobody wanted to know.

In her haste, Hannah managed to outstrip them enough that they were separated by the whims of a moving staircase. Neville groaned as they ran up to the edge, red-faced, just in time for the stone steps to swerve away with a decisive crunch. Harry squinted at the other landing and saw some upper year hurrying down the suddenly lengthened stairs to the third floor. This was one of the ones that switched floors on demand, though it always seemed to end up arriving too late.

Just as they resigned themselves to a five-minute wait, Hannah came running back down, waving frantically. She leaned over the banister at the halfway point and yelled, "Get over here! Go around!"

Harry and Neville blinked up at her, not moving for a long moment, and she ran down the rest of the stairs, still beckoning furiously.

"Come on," Harry muttered, making for the other side of the landing where they could go down and then back up.

They met Hannah on the third floor, where she immediately turned and gestured for them to follow, her mouth set into a solemn grimace.

"What is it?" Harry asked in a low voice.

"It's Vince," Hannah began, explaining between heavy breaths as they sprinted up the stairs. "He's fainted, or something. I don't know. But Harry, he wasn't at lessons at all. Do you think he's been there all day?"

A dense pit forming in his stomach, Harry shook his head vaguely, uncertain what he was trying to convey. He had to see it for himself.

He surged ahead, brushing aside the tacky burgundy curtain and looking wildly around the classroom, which was a mess of chairs, some of which were knocked over or even missing legs. He almost missed it, but on his third pass finally caught sight of wooden shoe soles peeking out from behind a stack of chairs in the back.

Vince was indeed out cold, lying crumpled in the corner like he had fallen over. Harry inhaled deeply, nostrils flaring, and breathed out in relief when he smelled no blood. Or did that just mean that Vince had been here long enough for the scent to dissipate?

Swallowing thickly, Harry knelt down and tried to get a closer look at Vince's head. Had he hit it on the wall? Footsteps clattered behind him as Hannah and Neville raced inside.

"Oh…" Neville breathed. "Should I go get the matron?"

"Yeah, that's probably a good idea," said Hannah. "Sorry, I wasn't thinking. We should have just gone there directly."

"Wait. Should we try to revive him first?" Harry asked, hesitant.

Something seemed very wrong about the situation. Why was Vince even here? He would have had to have left the Slytherin common room during breakfast without even stopping by the Great Hall for a bite to eat or telling his friends where he was going. In fact, he must have deliberately avoided telling Draco and Goyle what he was up to, for them to have remained so ignorant. Vince was hiding something, and when Harry thought back to some of the things he himself was hiding, he was sure he didn't want to do anything that might ruin things for his friend.

"How?" Hannah demanded. She had a good point. Harry knew there was a spell to rouse unconscious people, but a half-remembered incantation and unknown wand movement was probably not a good combination.

"Never mind," said Harry. Leaving Vince here wasn't going to do anybody any favours. If he hadn't woken up by himself already, he probably needed help. "You guys go. I'll stay here."

Hannah glanced back and forth between Vince and Neville. Harry gave her what he hoped was a reassuring look, and she stepped towards the door. "We'll be right back."

Exhaling, Harry straightened up along the wall and ran a hand through his hair. He couldn't see any obvious injury on Vince, and the boy did not look particularly pale or flushed. In fact, it was almost as if he were just asleep. His chest was rising and falling steadily. Hesitantly, Harry stuck out a foot and nudged Vince's leg. It dragged limply.

He wished he could do something. Why didn't he know any healing spells besides _episkey_? There were too many spells to learn and not enough time.

With nothing else to focus on, his mind wandered back to the main mystery at hand. What had Vince been doing up here in the morning? Harry turned his gaze back on the classroom at large. The fallen chairs—they were all in the centre, forming a sort of haphazard semicircle of debris. Had Vince been practising spells?

He glanced to the prone boy again and noticed for the first time that he had his wand still in hand. Harry pried it from his limp grasp and slipped it into one of Vince's robe pockets so it wouldn't get lost. He then stepped closer to the mess in the middle of the room, examining a detached chair leg. It was a jagged break, surely not the result of a severing charm. In fact, it looked as if it had been blasted off. He looked around for the chair it belonged to and found a rather scuffed and splintered seat bottom.

Probably dark magic, Harry thought. There was nothing illegal or harmful about casting curses at a chair, so perhaps some would not consider it to really be a practice of the dark arts at all, but Harry knew that one did not sneak off to try advanced curses without meaning to eventually use them on somebody. It seemed unlikely that Vince was going into furniture demolition any time soon.

" _Reparo_ ," said Harry as picked up the broken leg and fitted it to the chair manually. The spell didn't work. He reckoned that too much of the chair had been destroyed, or else the original curse was still preventing recovery. Frowning, Harry tried to transfigure the leg into an intact leg instead, using the other chair legs as a model. The transfiguration succeeded, but he still couldn't attach the leg to the chair.

Realising that he didn't actually need to fix the chair, just make it less obvious that it had been blown up, he stood the leg up, cast a freezing charm at it to hold it in place, and then balanced the rest of the chair on top. Perfect. He quickly repeated this treatment for the rest of the fallen furniture and managed to retreat back to the corner where Vince still lay just in time for Madam Pomfrey's entry.

She glanced to Harry as she arrived, smiling ruefully, and cast a deluge of spells at Vince's prone form. Her face fell immediately, her mouth thinning with each diagnostic.

"What's wrong with him? Is he going to be all right?" Hannah asked, craning her head as if it would let her see the results of the matron's spells.

"I'm taking him to the hospital wing," Madam Pomfrey said, conjuring a stretcher and levitating Vince onto it.

"But is he going to be all right?" Hannah repeated, her voice going scratchy as she followed the matron. Harry reached out to touch her arm, understanding why Madam Pomfrey didn't want to say anything—whatever was wrong with him was Vince's business, not theirs—but she turned and gave Hannah a sympathetic smile.

"Nothing some bed rest won't fix," she assured them. "You'll be able to visit him tomorrow."

Madam Pomfrey left them there to glance helplessly at each other.

"What do you think happened to him?" Neville asked. "Is he really sick?"

"I don't know. Why was he up here?" Hannah wondered, turning back to the classroom. Her eyes lingered on the chairs that Harry had hastily propped up. "Weren't those all knocked down before?"

"I fixed them," Harry said. "I think Vince was practising spells. Maybe something went wrong." He carefully did not mention what sorts of spells, and neither Hannah nor Neville remarked on how unlikely this explanation was at face value. Vince was not one to study without being dragged.

"I suppose we can ask him tomorrow," said Hannah. "Let's visit him first thing in the morning."

"What if he's still not awake?" Harry asked.

"What if he is?" said Hannah, mouth set in a firm line.

They met up on the fourth floor by the grand stair the next morning at seven before hurrying up the spiral staircase to the corridor that housed the hospital wing. It was early enough that almost nobody was up and about, so Harry was blindsided as they walked in and found that Vince already had a visitor—Professor Snape.

There was no chance to eavesdrop. Professor Snape's dark eyes snapped to them the moment they entered, and he straightened up. "You've learned your lesson, I hope, Mr Crabbe," he said, obviously preparing to leave.

"Yes, sir," Vince mumbled, but it was the sort of reluctant agreement that promised rebellion. Professor Snape seemed to recognise this, because he sneered.

"Tell your friends what happened. Perhaps they can knock some sense into you. Even Longbottom would not be so foolish as to condone your actions," he said, sweeping past them in a whirl of black robes.

"Don't listen to him, Neville," Hannah said as soon as Snape was out of earshot.

Neville, who had failed to disguise his flinching, shook his head. "That was sort of a compliment, almost."

Harry marched over to Vince's bedside and gave him a once-over. His chubby face was a little wan, and there was a sheen of sweat on his brow, but he looked otherwise healthy.

"So? What happened? Professor Snape even said to tell us, so spill," Harry said.

Vince shrank back slightly, and Harry felt a little bad. But what was he so scared of? He opened his mouth and nothing came out, so Harry tried to help.

"You were practising curses, right? And you got knocked out?" he supplied.

Vince nodded, staring at the white bedspread like it was the most fascinating thing in the world.

"Did your spell backfire?" Hannah asked. Harry winced, but Vince didn't seem embarrassed, only nervous. He shook his head. They all watched him expectantly.

"It was just too much," Vince muttered at last. "I wasn't strong enough."

Harry glanced at Neville and Hannah, but they too seemed confused by this cryptic explanation.

"What were you trying to cast?" Hannah asked.

Vince looked reluctant, but Harry gave him a serious stare, and he mumbled, "Blasting curse."

Well, that fit with the damage that the chairs had sustained, Harry supposed, based on the name, but he didn't actually know anything about that curse. It wasn't one of the ones that Quirrell and the Dark Lord had tried to teach him.

Neville made a small sound, and Harry glanced back to see that he was suddenly pale.

"But that's dark magic," he mumbled as the others also looked to him.

"It was only on chairs," Harry said, eyeing Vince's crestfallen face. Neville shook his head, taking a deep breath as if to steel himself.

"It's really dangerous. Dark magic isn't like other spells. You could really hurt yourself—permanently. You could hurt your magic." Neville shuddered.

"Hurt your magic?" Harry repeated.

"Literally," said Neville, "Gran says dark wizards feel pain when they do magic."

"I've never heard anything like that," Harry said. Petri certainly had no such affliction, given how often he summoned things in lieu of retrieving them from two feet away. Neville's grandmother must have been telling some kind of story to scare him off dark magic.

"It's true," said Vince in a small voice. "But that's only if it gets really bad. If I was just stronger… that's why I have to practise, right? Harry, you're always saying that practice is why you're better at magic."

Now everybody was looking at him, and Harry had no idea what to say. "I don't know. I mean practice helps you get better at spells, but it doesn't make it so you can do spells that are too advanced. Why don't you start with some easier curses?"

Vince looked uncertainly to each of their faces in turn. Then he looked away. "Yeah," he agreed, in exactly the same tone he had used on Professor Snape.

There was something he wasn't saying, something they were all missing. Harry was sure of it, but he had no idea what it could be. Vince obviously didn't want to talk about it, and before Harry could think of any oblique way to get him to explain, Madam Pomfrey came around and kicked them out.

Vince was discharged from the hospital wing in time for breakfast Friday morning, but Harry did not get the chance to talk to him before their first Defence Against the Dark Arts lesson with Lockhart after lunch, as the morning Transfiguration and Charms practicals had been with the Gryffindors.

Harry made it early to the Defence classroom, fully intending to ambush his friend as he arrived, but was stopped short by Professor Lockhart. The man's image was everywhere, his smile scintillating from dozens of portraits and photographs on the wall as well as the volumes laid out on the teacher's podium. The actual Professor Lockhart beamed at him in tandem with the pictures as soon as Harry entered.

"Ah, my first student of the afternoon! It's delightful to see such enthusiasm for learning in today's youth. Do you have any questions for me? Of course you do! What would you say to a sneak preview of the lesson? We have some time, so ask away. Ask anything," said Lockhart, approaching him and steering him bodily into the nearest desk. Harry gaped for a moment before he came to his senses.

Right. Lockhart was a dark arts expert, and Harry had just the question. "Sir, I heard that the dark arts can hurt the practitioner's magic. I was wondering if you could tell me more about that—is it true, and when does it happen?"

Lockhart looked a bit put out, but recovered quickly. "Oh—yes, excellent question! The dark arts are very, very bad. Evil, you understand. Evil corrupts you and makes you ugly on the inside and out. I've seen it happen hundreds of times to ordinary people, terribly tragic. So be good, and don't go thinking of practising the dark arts, now."

He had the temerity to wag his finger with a sly grin. Harry had to consciously clench his jaw to keep it shut. Had he hallucinated the waffle that had just come out of Lockhart's mouth?

Maybe it was the imperius curse. Harry frowned, feeling suddenly cold. He didn't think a properly cast imperius curse was supposed to muddle somebody up, but Lockhart had been subject to Harry's inexpert attempt before that. Could it have damaged him permanently?

Even if it had, the new curse should have at least caused him to appear all straightened out. Perhaps the Dark Lord had ordered him not to teach anything useful? Harry let out a breath he didn't remember holding. That would make sense.

His suspicion was confirmed as the other students arrived and Professor Lockhart commenced with the lesson. Neville, who had taken the seat next to Harry's and had all seven of Lockhart's books piled on his desk, paled as the professor swept over and plucked _Travels with Trolls_ off the top of the pile, using the picture of his face to give a self-aggrandizing introduction. Harry, who hadn't been sure which books would be relevant, had luckily decided to bring none of them.

"I thought we'd start today with a little quiz," Professor Lockhart said, bustling around the room with a stack of parchments like a _muggle_. Hermione, on Neville's other side, perked up at the word 'quiz', while everybody else shrank back.

When they were told to begin, Harry flipped over his parchment and stared at the questions for a long time. They were all questions about Gilderoy Lockhart's personal life. He was torn between indignation, incredulity, and embarrassment—the last because he actually knew the answers to almost all of them.

_1\. What is Gilderoy Lockhart's favourite colour?_

Harry's quill bled a dark spot into the parchment as he pressed it down without moving it. Finally, he pushed past the burning in his ears and dragged his hand, writing, 'Lilac'.

When Professor Lockhart had collected all their quizzes, again without magic, he sat at the front and reviewed them on the spot.

"Tut tut, not many of you remembered that my favourite colour was lilac. I say so in _Year with the Yeti_. Some of you will have to read _Voyages with Vampires_ in more detail as well—I mention very clearly that my favourite singer of all time is Lorcan D'Eath, and it's a real shame that he hasn't released a new album since that scandal with Celestina Warbeck."

Lockhart paused to wink at them all. Harry's jaw hurt from its repeated opening and closing, and out of the corner of his eye he saw a row of Gryffindors looking openly horrified, with the exception of Hermione, who seemed to be hanging on to Lockhart's every word. She started as he mentioned her name and how she had got everything right—no surprise there—and then it was Harry's turn to jump as _his_ name came out in that smarmy voice.

"Harry Potter! My my, a minor celebrity, and a diligent student to boot. Nearly full marks as well! Excellent, but take care not to get a big head. You've got a long road ahead of you still. Mr Potter, where are you…" Harry was certainly not going to raise his hand like Hermione had. With no hope of seeing past the _fidelius_ charm, Lockhart continued with a blithe grin at the back wall, "Yes, well, ten points to Ravenclaw!"

Harry felt dirty, and was never more thankful for his anonymity. He wasn't sure he would have been able to handle his housemates' mystified looks, had they been pointed directly at him. Terry was sniggering from a few rows back. Harry could do without getting mocked for the rest of term.

He sank into his seat as Lockhart pontificated to the class about some foul creatures that they were about to face. Harry eyed the covered cage on the professor's desk, trying to guess what could be inside. He fingered the wand in his pocket. Would the Dark Lord have made him bring something truly dangerous into the school?

He had no more time to think as Lockhart dramatically sheared the white sheet off the cage, revealing a buzzing, bright blue mass. "Freshly-caught Cornish pixies!"

One of the Gryffindors laughed out loud, so Harry relaxed. The pixies were humanoid but completely blue and slightly larger than his hand. They chattered in unintelligible, high-pitched voices that mingled with the continuous drone of their fluttering wings.

Lockhart opened the cage and was promptly beset by a mob of the things. They zoomed out more quickly than Harry's eye could track and a pair of them grabbed at his robes and pulled him up. Panicking, Harry gripped his wand jabbed it up in the air. " _Aduro!"_

Twin tongues of flame shot out of his wand, charring a hole through a mass of pixies and eliciting a chorus of screams. The pixies holding him dropped him in surprise and he cast the scorching spell again at them to chase them off. Harry tried to think of something more appropriate to cast, going through the spells he knew one by one and rejecting them all—why did he know so many useless spells?

Right. Useless spells. He shot red sparks out of his wand with a bang, hoping to startle the pixies. They flinched for a moment, but regrouped quickly, buzzing ever more angrily.

"Use the freezing charm," Hermione hissed as she stumbled over to him and Neville, felling a pair of pixies neatly with said charm.

Harry took a moment to marvel at this solution—he had dismissed it because he figured it wouldn't work on living things, but Hermione was right. Pixies dropped out of the air, their wings locked tight.

He glanced around for Lockhart just in time to see some pixies divest him from his wand and toss it out the window. Harry shook his head, bewildered.

The bell rang and he grabbed Neville and immediately ran for the door at an advantage, as they had been in the front row. He turned and flattened himself to the wall, hoping to catch Vince on his way out, but it was hopeless—there were too many students, all pushing to escape the chaos of the Defence classroom. When Lockhart himself finally stumbled out and slammed the door shut, Harry had to accept that he had missed Vince again.

Neville groaned, trying to straighten out his rumpled and torn robes. Harry looked him over and his eyes caught on an angry red mark his cheek.

" _Episkey. Reparo_ , _"_ he cast, and Neville gave him a wan smile.

"Thanks. That was such a mess. Are you all right?" he asked. Harry examined the shoulders of his robe for any tears, but they seemed whole.

"I'm fine," Harry said. "I was planning on going to the library. Want to come?"

"What are you going to work on?" asked Neville, adjusting the strap of his book bag, which was nearly bursting at the seams with Lockhart's bibliography.

"Well, I wanted to do some research on what you said yesterday, about how dark magic can hurt the caster. I tried to ask Lockhart but he didn't say anything useful," Harry said. He paused as the door thudded open behind him, glancing back in surprise.

Hermione walked out, flushed with exertion and with her hair in some disarray.

"Oh, hi Neville, Harry," Hermione said, regarding them with some surprise. Her eyes slid over to Harry questioningly. "Were you waiting for someone? There's no one else inside."

"We were about to head to the library. What were you still doing in there? I saw Lockhart leave already," Harry said.

"Professor Lockhart," Hermione said with emphasis, "asked me to help put the pixies back in the cage."

"All by yourself?" Neville squeaked. Hermione gave a demure shrug.

"It was some good hands-on experience," she said.

Harry grunted in an effort not to snort. Even when Petri unleashed this or that dark creature or curse at him, he at least provided instructions beforehand. Lockhart had so far demonstrated pure incompetence. Harry was surer than ever that it was the Dark Lord's intention. The quality of Defence lessons had already outstripped Professor Quirrell's dismal standard in uselessness, which was quite an accomplishment.

"The library, you said? I need to go there too," Hermione said. "Have you started the Transfiguration essay yet?"

Harry shook his head. He had spent his free period after Transfiguration trying to finish up his twelve inches on Nalrod the Noxious for Binns. That the infamous goblin commander had the same name as his late acquaintance had made it rather more difficult to concentrate on the paper.

"I was going to research something for Defence," Harry said.

"Really? What?" Hermione asked.

Harry told her, glancing at Neville all the while. The other boy nodded along, so he figured he had not misunderstood the premise.

"Dark magic, you said? Does that apply to jinxes and hexes too, then? I've practised quite a few of those—just to try them—I'd never cast them on a person, of course. Do you think I might have accidentally injured myself?" Hermione asked, biting her lip.

"No, jinxes and hexes are all right," Neville said. "It has to be really dark magic, like the horrible sort that nobody would use for anything good."

"Curses, then?" Hermione asked, still looking worried.

"It can't be all curses," Harry said. "People cast curses like the reductor curse to demolish things, like for construction." That was something Professor Quirrell had claimed, anyway.

"Really? I didn't know that," muttered Neville.

"There's the Full Body-Bind too… that's also classified as a curse even though it doesn't exactly hurt anyone," Hermione said. "And we learned that in Defence last year."

Harry disagreed that the body-bind curse did not hurt the victim. Maybe it didn't hurt physically, but it was distinctly awful to be trapped in one's body, unable to move. It was a good example, however, of a curse that they had all practised to no ill effect.

They had reached the library by then, and Harry paused in the threshold. "Where should we look?" he asked, glancing around as if the appropriate shelf might jump out to him if only he wished hard enough.

"I'll ask Madam Pince," said Hermione and stalked towards the front desk before Harry could object.

"Let's go find a table," Neville whispered. "Best leave Hermione to it. Madam Pince doesn't like me much. I spilled dirt on a library book once."

Harry winced. "She doesn't like anybody."

"Anybody but Hermione," said Neville, rubbing his shoulders as he set his bag down by his chair. He took out _Year with the Yeti_ and stared miserably at the winking Lockhart on the cover.

Hermione came back in record time with an armful of books, which she laid carefully on their table. Harry read over the titles in awe— _Maladies of Magic Misuse; Magical Conditions: Causes, Cures, and Complications; Dysfunctions of Magic; and The Dark Arts, a Double-Edged Blade._

"These looked promising," she said.

"Wow. How did you find all these so quickly?" Harry asked.

"I asked Madam Pince about the possible consequences of casting dark magic and she pointed me to the section on healing. And this one," she pointed to _The Dark Arts, a Double-Edged Blade_ , "is referenced by the others so I picked it up too."

Harry raised his eyebrows, impressed. "How did you know where it would be?"

Hermione beamed at him. "There's this neat spell, a _parecium_ , that lets you search for certain text. It works even if it's hidden or written in invisible ink. Look. _Aparecium_ Dark Arts," she said, and sure enough 'Dark Arts' began to glow with a faint light on the cover of the book she had tapped.

That was right, Harry remembered now. Rookwood had used this spell in the Department of Mysteries to find the prophecy.

"That's brilliant. How do you know that spell?" Harry asked. Wasn't Hermione muggle-born?

"It's in the _Standard Book of Spells._ There's a version that's not split up into years. I've been memorising all the spells in there—it goes up through OWL level," she explained.

"You're memorising every spell in the _Standard Book_ through OWL level," Harry repeated in amazement. "But how do you have time to practise all of them? There must be hundreds of spells in there. And some of them are probably too advanced, aren't they?"

"Yes, well, I haven't tried all of them," said Hermione, drawing her hands up to her chest to fiddle with her wand. "I only try them if I think they'll be useful, or if they come up. Most of them work for me, but you're right, there are ones that I can't get."

Harry stared at her. "You're a genius," he finally said, running his hands through his hair. He could hit himself for not thinking of it—why should he have to actually practise spells that he might never use? It sufficed to know the incantation, wand movement, and purpose of the spells, and if he actually had occasion to use them, he would have everything he needed. It had been a while since he had completely failed a spell even on his first try—Petri had even commented on his vastly improved wandwork. This whole time, he had been thinking of different spells as different skills in his repertoire, but they were all _magic_ , and he had had plenty of practice already at magic.

"Oh," Hermione muttered, flustered. "It's not that hard. I'm sure you could do it too, if you tried."

"I'll definitely give it a try," Harry said. "It's a brilliant idea. Neville, don't you think so? I can't believe I wasted so much time practising cheering charms."

And maybe that was what Annette had been trying to say, too, when she had been so incredulous about his spell practice.

"That sounds neat, Harry, but I don't think I could just memorise spells like that," Neville said. He glanced at his wrist and frowned. Harry followed his gaze to the remembrand and saw that its display was bright red.

Harry looked at his own bare wrist and sighed. Maybe he should reconsider too—he hadn't even remembered to go back to carrying his remembrall around, let alone the remembrand.

"Studying with the remembrall should help, though," Harry said.

"A remembrall—that's that glass ball that you have, right, Neville? What exactly does it do?" Hermione asked. Neville took out his remembrall, which swirled with crimson smoke.

"When it turns red like this, it means you've forgotten something," he explained, sighing. "Not much use if it's always red. It doesn't tell you what you've forgotten."

"It turns other colours too," Harry added, "blue when you've been studying too long and should take a break, and orange to remind you when to revise."

"That seems really useful. Do a lot of people have them?" Hermione asked, biting her lip.

"Not really," Neville muttered. "It's kind of an old people thing."

"It _is_ useful for studying, though," Harry protested.

"Where can you get one?" asked Hermione.

"My uncle makes them and sells them in his shop," Harry said.

Hermione laughed. "No wonder you know so much about them. How much are they, usually?"

Harry tried to recall the shop's price cheat sheet and winced. "About two galleons." That was pretty expensive for a study tool.

"Oh, not bad at all!" said Hermione, and Harry stared. Was she secretly rich? After a moment, she picked up on his expression and frowned. "What? Five pounds to a galleon, so ten pounds, which is two weeks' allowance. I don't have anything to spend it on at Hogwarts so I'll have saved up a good amount by the time I go home."

"Did you say five pounds to a galleon?" Harry asked, wondering if he had misheard.

Hermione nodded. "That was the exchange rate at Gringotts both times I was there."

"The goblins let you exchange pounds for galleons?" Harry asked, completely incredulous. Everything he had heard from Silviu and read in History of Magic suggested that goblins would sooner die than make such a trade. Galleons were gold and pounds were just flimsy muggle paper. If goblins accepted pounds, Silviu's company wouldn't have to go to ridiculous lengths to change their ill-gotten muggle wealth back to wizarding currency.

"Well how else would muggle-borns get wizarding money?" Hermione pointed out. She seemed to realise something, and added, "Oh, pounds are muggle money, sorry. It's a strange name, I suppose."

"No, I know that, that's not what I mean. Don't you remember the goblin rebellions over being the sole creators of money? I think it's even in the current treaty that wizards will not recognise any currency other than the galleon," Harry said.

"You're right… that _is_ part of the treaty," Hermione muttered. "But then how are we allowed to exchange money? There's got to be a book on this." She stood up abruptly and hurried off into the stacks.

Harry and Neville blinked bemusedly at each other. Harry shrugged and grabbed _The Dark Arts, a Double-Edged Blade_ and flipped it open. Not for the first time, he wished he could glean the book's contents at a glance. The table of contents remained stubbornly English, however, and thus magically impenetrable. He paged to the introduction:

The topic of the Dark Arts is a multifaceted and ever-changing one. Even the very definition of the Dark Arts is in constant flux. For the purposes of this book, we will be using the following definition of the Dark Arts: Magic produced with the intent to harm.

One immediate corollary of this definition is that no piece of magic can be classified as Dark Magic without the context of its caster. This result is a contentious one, for some would argue that if we must evaluate the caster's intentions in every case, we might as well discard the paradigm of Dark Magic entirely and turn to moral philosophy for answers. In the next chapter, we will fully present the evidence for treating the Dark Arts from an intentional perspective. For now, the simplified rationale for this view is that there are well-established physical side effects to performing certain magics, side effects which appear in only a portion of practitioners. The affected portion is not random: there is a clear pattern that points to the mindset of the caster as a decisive factor.

Harry skimmed over the rest of the introduction and flipped to the next chapter, searching for some description of these 'well-established physical side effects'. It was right there on the second page—a convenient list: "Common symptoms resulting from the use, or as some would say, misuse, of certain magics include magical sensitivity, diminished sense of pleasure and pain, involuntary transmogrification, infertility, and persistent loss of appetite."

He stared at the last symptom. 'Persistent loss of appetite' described Petri well enough—by Mrs Figg's reckoning, he hadn't bothered to eat real food without outside prompting for nigh on fifty years. Vince hadn't eaten much at the start-of-term feast, either, and then he had skipped breakfast, which was utterly unlike him. But what did the other symptoms mean?

Grabbing one of the healing texts, _Maladies of Magic Misuse,_ Harry found 'magical sensitivity – hypergoetisis' in the index. It was everywhere, and seemed to be the topic of multiple chapters. He turned to the first mention, which was an entry with a broad definition, as he had hoped.

"Hey, Neville, I think I found something," he whispered. Neville looked up from Lockhart's book with alacrity. "Listen to this: 'hypergoetisis, or magical sensitivity, is a magical disorder characterised by pain associated with the use of magic. Some people who have hypergoetisis report a mild tingling in their extremities when casting intensive spells, while others experience debilitating pain or seizures even when attempting simple charms or brewing potions.' And one of the causes is overuse of dark magic. But it says only one in twenty wizards who frequently use dark magic experiences it, based on a study of aurors."

"Aurors?" Neville repeated, frowning. "Why would they look at aurors?"

"Well aurors probably have to use curses, right? Hexes aren't going to be much good in a duel against a real dark wizard," Harry pointed out.

"Oh. I suppose," Neville mumbled, looking crestfallen.

A connection struck Harry suddenly, and he said, "But curses are only dark magic if you define dark magic like in our Defence text, as spells which are designed to harm. This book says that dark magic is magic done with the _intent_ to harm, so maybe it doesn't count since aurors would be intending to protect people."

Some colour returned to Neville's face, and Harry gave him an encouraging smile, remembering that Neville's dad had been an auror.

That theory made sense, anyway. If only one in twenty aurors suffered from magical sensitivity, the cause couldn't really just be using curses too often. Hadn't the _Dark Arts_ book said that the people who suffered from symptoms weren't random? He turned back to it and continued to read through the first chapter.

This book also cited the same auror study from _Maladies,_ but it went on to reference a survey of Azkaban inmates that had been conducted after the end of Lord Voldemort's campaign of terror. Half of the convicted Death Eaters reported suffering from mild to moderate magical sensitivity, though there were no severe cases reported, which made sense as severe magical sensitivity would make it difficult for someone to cast spells at all, let alone go around magically torturing and killing people.

One of the known causes of magical sensitivity was apparently repeated overextension, which happened when a spell forcibly drew too much magic through the caster's body at once. It normally only happened with undetectable extension charms and complicated enchantments, but the author of the book argued that certain ways of casting dark magic caused the same effect, even when the spell in question could otherwise be cast safely.

Harry was interrupted from his reading by a cross Hermione. "There's nothing!" she whispered, coming up to the table empty-handed and clutching at the edge until her knuckles turned white. "There's no mention of an exchange rate or exchanging money even being possible anywhere. I even tried looking for 'buying' or 'trading' muggle money, but that didn't work. It's definitely possible, though. I've literally done it with my parents. Twice."

"That's strange," said Harry, frowning. "Maybe it's some loophole in the treaty, with muggle money being allowed? Since the treaty is technically between _wizards_ and goblins."

"That can't be it. It was at Gringotts, so it was obviously goblin-sanctioned," Hermione pointed out.

"Right. So is there a limit to how much money you can exchange?" Harry asked, thinking idly of the vampire company's operations. The most expensive ingredient in the elixir to induce euphoria was the sopophorous bean at nearly a sickle an ounce. On account of each bean not producing very much juice, it could take up to a dozen of them to get enough juice for a cauldron of elixir, which was seven doses. If he rounded up, that was one galleon for seven doses, which went for ten quid each. Seventy pounds to be made from a galleon, while Gringotts charged only five to get it back… Harry wondered if he had botched up the maths somehow, because it seemed too good to be true.

"Oh, I never thought to ask," Hermione said. "I think the most we ever did was a hundred pounds at once."

"Who do you think would know about this? Binns?" Harry asked, though he dismissed the ghostly professor almost at once. Hermione shook her head slowly.

"I don't know. Maybe the Muggle Studies professor?" she suggested. That seemed like a long shot to Harry as well.

"What about Professor Flitwick? He's half-goblin," Harry said. Hermione frowned.

"That doesn't mean he knows anything about Gringotts," she said severely. Harry shrugged.

"He's got relatives who work there," he said. "I'll ask him at office hours."

Hermione's eyebrows disappeared into her bushy hair. "Professor Flitwick has office hours?"

"For Ravenclaws. Doesn't Professor McGonagall have them for you lot?" Harry asked.

"No," Hermione huffed. Harry smirked, glancing over to Neville, who cracked a timid smile. Hermione looked ready to storm up to Professor McGonagall's office right this instant to demand her due. After a moment, however, she sagged and pulled up a chair, her gaze flickering to the open book pinned beneath Harry's elbow. "Did you find anything useful in those books?"

Harry told her about magical sensitivity and the possible relation between dark magic and overextension.

"I heard dark spells use a lot of magic," Neville said.

"Most really destructive spells do seem to be upper OWL or NEWT level," Hermione said, nodding. "I haven't tried any of those yet, thank goodness. But do you really think they would put spells in the _Standard Book of Spells_ that could be dangerous to the caster?"

"Well it's supposed to depend on how you cast it, according to this book. There's a safe way of doing it," Harry pointed out.

"But nothing like that is mentioned in the _Standard Book_ ," Hermione muttered, twisting her hair around her fingers in agitation.

"What kinds of destructive spells are even in there?" Harry asked, curious.

Why hadn't he thought to look for himself? He supposed Petri's warning about staying away from curses above his level had stuck too hard. Actually, perhaps that warning pertained to the very same thing he was researching now. But if that was the case, why hadn't Petri just told him that messing up dark magic could cripple him? That seemed even more salient than losing ones' wits or getting arrested.

Hermione scrunched up her nose. "Let's see… there's the reductor curse, like you mentioned before, the explosion curse, the excavation curse, the blasting curse…" Neville and Harry turned to look at each other immediately, and Hermione stopped. "What?"

"Nothing," Neville mumbled.

"We were talking about it earlier, is all," Harry said, trying to seem casual. Hermione paused for a moment longer, scrutinising them, but seemed to accept it.

"Now that I think about it, none of these are for casting on people. Maybe that's the difference? The only curses I can think of that target people are the Full Body-Bind and the leg-locking curse, and we learned both of those last year. They seem quite mild, for curses, honestly," said Hermione. "I'm not sure why they aren't considered jinxes."

"They work directly against a person's will, so they're probably a lot stronger than most jinxes," Harry pointed out. "Jinxes have silly effects. Like the Jelly-Legs. That's weird, but it's not that bad. You can still walk. Getting frozen or having your legs locked together basically traps you."

Neville shuddered. "Yeah, the Leg-Locker is awful. It's definitely a curse," he agreed.

"It's bad, but it's not as bad as, say…" Hermione trailed off, squinting into the distance and frowning as she tried to come up with an example.

"A curse that blinds someone?" Harry suggested, thinking of the conjunctivitis curse.

"Right, that would be really harmful," Hermione agreed. "So we should be fine if we stay away from horrible magic like that."

But that wasn't true. Harry had cast curses that were for hurting people before—the enemy's curse and the conjunctivitis curse certainly qualified, and the imperius curse, as one of the Unforgivables, probably also counted. Yet he was sure that he had experienced none of the nasty symptoms he had read about. Moreover, Vince had been casting the blasting curse, which was apparently in the _Standard Book_ , but had ended up ruining his appetite and knocking himself out.

Neither he nor Neville brought up this contradictory evidence to Hermione, who finally remembered that she had come to the library to finish her Transfiguration essay and disappeared back into the stacks for references.

Harry suspected that Vince had overextended himself somehow. His unconscious stint reminded Harry of how he had slept for a week after that time when Petri had attempted to kill him.

"I'm worried about Vince," Neville said almost inaudibly, slumping against the table. Harry learned in close to hear him. "Do you think he's going to become a dark wizard?"

"What? Isn't it a little early to say that? We're second years," Harry whispered, glancing around in some panic. Their corner of the library was empty enough—the nearest students were several tables away. He looked back to Neville. Would Neville talk about him in that same nervous tone if he knew that Harry was more of a dark wizard than Vince could possibly be? Vince had parents!

"Gran says his family supported You-Know-Who, but they got off by bribing the Wizengamot," Neville said, hunching even further forwards. All right, so perhaps having parents did not preclude anything. "Not that I think he's like that. He's our friend. I'm just worried for him, you know? I don't want him to get hurt."

Harry nodded, pursing his lips in thought. "We should help him," he said.

Neville tilted his head. "How?"

"Well, the blasting curse is in the _Standard Book of Spells_ , right? There must be a safe way to cast it. So we find out how and we learn it together with him." Harry said.

"Oh. That's… are you sure that's a good idea?" Neville asked, a slight quaver in his voice. "What if we all end up hurting ourselves?" Harry frowned.

"We'll be careful. We have to try," he said. "We're his friends."

Neville was silent for a long moment. Finally, he took a deep breath, and his shoulders squared. He looked up and nodded.

"Okay."

Pleased at coming up with a plan of action, Harry sprang to his feet and went to retrieve some reference texts. Neville was right that it would be terrible if all they managed to do was land themselves in the hospital wing as well, so Harry was determined to learn the spell the right way.

He first decided to study the _Compendium_ entry, since Neville had gulped audibly at the sight of the huge tome. Harry slid the much thinner _Standard Book_ over to his friend, who cracked it open with a glum air.

"Just make sure to get the incantation and wand movement," Harry said, taking pity on him. For his part, he was going to properly understand the curse, like Petri always advised. If he learned it first, he could teach Neville.

According to the _Compendium,_ the blasting curse travelled straight and produced a sudden force that radiated outwards in a sphere from the point of impact. Though this effect sounded simple and hex-like at face value, it was actually possible to trigger the curse's 'blast' at any point in its trajectory, or even to use a single curse to unleash multiple smaller blasts, which made it versatile. Furthermore, because it did not directly cause the target to explode, but generated force instead, it worked indiscriminately on living and non-living targets.

Hermione came back, and Harry flipped to the next page casually, not eager to explain their plan to her. No doubt she wouldn't approve. For a few minutes, he pretended to read about the blazing charm, which apparently created an intensely bright and hot beam of light. Then he gathered up the healing books that Hermione had found for him and excused himself.

"I'll see you tomorrow morning," he said to Neville.


	45. Sharer

“So the incantation is pronounced _confringo_ ,” Harry said, drawing his wand and levelling it at the already-broken chair that he had propped up. Neville hung back nervously, hugging the wall. 

They were alone in their usual classroom, preparing to try the blasting curse. It would be embarrassing if it turned out that it was simply too advanced for them to cast at all, so they hadn’t revealed their plan to  anyone else yet. Harry wasn’t worried about anyone stumbling upon them, since Vince had been studiously avoiding them, and Hannah was busy with her Hufflepuff friends.

Gripping his wand firmly, Harry jabbed it forward and focused intently on the nearest chair leg. “ _Confringo!_ ”

His wand flashed and there was a loud crack and a puff of dust. The chair toppled over, revealing a gouge mark in the ground. He had missed, but the curse had worked.

“Huh. That was easier than I expected,” Harry said, inspecting his wand. He flexed his wrist, checking for any sensitivity, but he was sure that he had felt nothing abnormal as he had cast the spell. It had moved more quickly than he had thought it would, too—his eyes had barely tracked the spell light. How was someone supposed to dodge this in a fight? Then again, it seemed that unlike a jinx, which relied on eye-contact, the blasting curse had to be physically aimed with the wand.

“Wow,” said Neville, sounding a little unnerved.

“You have a go,” Harry said, stepping back.

“I don’t… do you really think I need to? You’ve got it now, right?” Neville mumbled. Harry frowned.

“Come on. It’s better if we both learn it,” he said. Privately, he thought that Vince might take it the wrong way if Harry just demonstrated his own ability to cast the spell—he didn’t want to seem like he was showing the other boy up.

“ _Confringo_ ,” said Neville, so timidly that the total lack of response failed to surprise Harry at all.

“I think you need to be more violent,” Harry said. “It’s a jab, like this.” He demonstrated propelling his wand forward quickly.

Neville’s arm wobbled when he tried to copy him. “ _Confringo!_ ”

Angry red sparks dribbled from the tip of his wand, and then with a great bang Neville was thrown backwards, his wand soaring up and smacking against the ceiling before ricocheting off.

“Bloody hell, are you all right?” Harry ran up to Neville, who groaned miserably from underneath a fallen chair. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have made you do it. I didn’t think it would backfire like that.”

“I’m okay,” said Neville, a little muffled. He sat up and rubbed the back of his head, wincing. Harry cast a basic healing charm at him to forestall any bruising.

“Sorry,” he said again, holding out a hand to help him up. “If you don’t want to, you don’t have to.”

“No,” said Neville. “I want to try again.”

Harry nodded, standing back. Perhaps the backfiring had actually inspired Neville with more confidence—after all, it had still been evidence of magical ability.

None of Neville’s next attempts produced more than weakly fizzing sparks, however, and he slouched in clear disappointment. Harry tried to imagine what might push the timid boy to make a proper attack. He was sure that Neville was missing the intent to destroy.

“Maybe you should think of blasting someone you really don’t like,” Harry suggested. He regretted saying it immediately, as it occurred to him that perhaps Neville wasn’t the sort of person to hold a grudge against anybody.

Neville surprised him, however, squaring his shoulders and scrunching up his face. Who could he be imagining?

“ _Confringo!_ ”

The chair exploded, and Harry dove instinctively even though the splinters fell short of striking him. Neville, too, had fallen to the floor.

“Great job,” said Harry, standing back up cautiously to survey the damage. Chunks of wood were strewn across the classroom and there was a small crater where the chair had stood.

Neville didn’t respond, and a second glance told Harry that something was wrong. He hurried over, checking his friends for injuries, but it didn’t look like he had been hit by any of the debris. Heart sinking, Harry tried to check for a pulse, fumbled with Neville’s limp wrist, and then thought better of it and put his hand up to his face instead. A warm puff of air misted his palm and he sighed with relief.

He supposed that it was the same thing that had happened to Vince. Harry grimaced. This was definitely his fault—if he hadn’t come up with this stupid scheme, Neville would never have even considered trying to learn a curse. It was Harry who had twisted the matter of learning dark magic into something resembling a good cause and led his friend into trouble.

Harry hadn’t been affected though. He paused to consider why that was the case. Neville hadn’t passed out on the previous attempt, either. There had been a backfire, and some weak results first. Harry’s gaze flickered to the hole in the ground. That final curse…

Such a powerful blast must have taken a lot of magic. It seemed clearer than ever to Harry that both his friends had suffered overextension. But how had they been able to force so much magic through themselves?  Their bodies should have limited the volume.

That must have been what had happened to Neville the first time. Harry remembered back during the summer when he had tried to cast an overly-ambitious animation charm, and the magic had surged into his wand and drained right back out in an aimless burst, knocking him down.  But i f the spell was too difficult, he couldn’t see how Neville  had  been able to succeed the next time, and so explosively.

Had he really been imagining blowing somebody up? Harry furrowed his eyebrows, a churning feeling in his gut. Intent to harm… that was what the book had said characterised dark magic. Did it count even if it was just a hypothetical intent to harm?

The sound of rapid footsteps reached his ears, and Harry surged to his feet, hurriedly using  _mobilicorpus_ to hide Neville behind a stack of chairs. What was he supposed to do about the disaster in the middle of the room?

“ _Reparo!_ ” he hissed, and some loose tiles slotted themselves back into place, but there were still gaps in the floor. Instead of trying to fix it again, he arranged some more spare chairs over the hole and stood in front of it just as somebody pulled the burgundy curtain aside and shoved their face in.

It was Percy. 

“Is everything all right in here? I heard a bang,” he said, looking around the disorderly classroom in confusion. His gaze landed on Harry. “Oh, hello Harry.”

“Hi Percy, sorry about that,” Harry said, moving closer to draw the prefect’s attention away from the mess behind him. “I was practising some spells and I knocked over some chairs.”

“That was a chair? It sounded like an explosion,” Percy said, raising his eyebrows.

Harry cursed inwardly. Percy’s brothers were notorious troublemakers, so of course he knew what a bad excuse sounded like. Harry plastered on his best sheepish smile.

“Ah, I might have dropped it from the ceiling… then it broke,” he said, gesturing to a stray chair leg. “And then I tried to fix it, but I must have said the incantation wrong, because my spell backfired.”

“A backfire? Are you all right?” Percy asked, thankfully buying this tale.

“I’m fine,” Harry said, running a hand through his hair to make it seem more dishevelled. This was not a difficult task, given its usual rat’s nest appearance.

“You shouldn’t be practising spells unsupervised,” Percy admonished. Harry tried to act abashed, but then looked up at Percy with wide eyes.

“I know we’re not allowed to do magic in the corridors, but I thought since it’s an empty classroom, it would be all right. Am I in trouble?” Harry asked. “It’s only… charms club hasn’t started yet, and I wanted to do some revising.”

“No, no, you’re not in trouble,” Percy said, defrosting a little at the mention of charms club. “Penelope’s planning on having the first meeting tomorrow. I know the notice isn’t up yet—she’s been busy.”

For some reason, Percy turned pink at this.

“That’s great,” said Harry. “See you tomorrow, then?”

Perhaps it was audacious of him to dismiss a prefect like that, but Percy simply nodded. He seemed distracted.

“See you tomorrow. And be careful. It would be hypocritical of me to discourage extra studying, but make sure you’re well-versed on all the theory of a spell before you try it,” he said.

“Of course,” Harry agreed. When Percy finally left, he let out a tense breath, hurrying back to check on Neville again. Other than the fact that he was unconscious, he seemed fine. Harry wondered if he could wake him up. If only he knew the spell for it!

He needed to start employing Hermione’s spell-learning strategy post-haste. He remembered that he had left Neville in the library with a copy of the  _Standard Book of Spells_ .  Perhaps the other boy had checked it out.

Harry paused for a moment with his hand hovering over Neville’s bag. Glancing again at Neville’s unmoving form, he shrugged and opened up the rucksack, reaching forwards carefully in case it had some kind of protective charm on it. No teeth unsheathed to chomp on his fingers, so he rifled through the contents, grimacing at the somewhat moist atmosphere inside. The bag seemed to be stuffed full of spare curls of parchment. Harry felt the feathery brush of a quill and something rough and squishy. He recoiled as it seemed to pulse under his fingers.

A high-pitched warbling reached his ears, and he peered into the bag incredulously. The sound persisted, and the only thing Harry could liken it to was the whirr of Uncle Vernon’s fax machine.

Fathomless black eyes blinked up at him. Of course Neville kept his toad in his rucksack. Moving it gingerly to the side,  Harry grasped for the book-like shape at the very bottom of the nest of papers, sighing in relief as it turned out to be the right one. He hurriedly dropped  the  flap of the rucksack, pulled up an intact chair, and let the  _Standard Book_ fall open on his lap,  before drawing  his wand and employing the spell Hermione had shown him.

“ _Aparecium_ revive,” he said, tapping the book. Soft light immediately began to spill from the pages, and he flipped through the text, eye on the headers. He found the reviving spell quickly enough with this method. A quick perusal of the entry suggested that it was simple enough and would be safe to use.

“ _Rennervate_ ,” he cast at Neville, crouching down in front of him. The boy shifted and broke out into a bleary moan.

“Ow,” he muttered, sitting up. He was rubbing at his arm—his wand arm. He glanced around in obvious confusion. “What happened? How did I get over here all of a sudden?”

“You passed out and I moved you over,” Harry told him. “Are you all right?”

“Everything hurts,” Neville said, grimacing. He was losing colour rapidly and beginning to sweat bullets. Harry wondered if he should have left him unconscious after all.

“Your arm?” Harry asked, gesturing to where Neville was still clearly trying to soothe some pain.

“Feels like it did when I broke it, except it’s not broken, obviously,” he said, flexing his fingers gingerly.

“What were you thinking of?” Harry asked.

“What?” said Neville, baffled.

“When you cast the curse,” Harry clarified. He indicated the poorly concealed rubble behind him with a jerk of his head. “You pulverised that chair.”

Neville’s eyes widened as he looked past Harry.  His lip quavered for a moment, before his expression hardened, and he bit out, in a high voice, “Good.” His hand curled tightly around his injured arm.

Harry stared at him in astonishment, waiting for some explanation for this uncharacteristic behaviour.

“You know about the Azkaban breakout, right?” Neville asked after a beat. Harry blinked.

“Yes. Isn’t that why they sent the dementors?” he said. Neville nodded.

“Well those people definitely deserved to be in there. They deserve Azkaban and worse for what they did to my—to innocent people.” He gripped his wand, gritting his teeth against the pain. “It’s not right that they’re out there, free to hurt others. That’s who I was thinking of. The Lestranges.”

His voice went very quiet at the end, and his face crumpled. He closed his eyes and tilted his head back.

Harry didn’t know what to say to that. He shifted from his crouch to sit down on the ground, eyeing Neville’s twisted face. He looked so fraught. Had he truly suffered on account of his harmful intent? It still didn’t seem right. Harry had cast the conjunctivitis curse at a snake before without suffering any side effect, and he couldn’t imagine that he had somehow cursed a living thing without intent to harm. 

Something that Professor Quirrell, or perhaps the Dark Lord, had emphasised to him from the start came to him—intent wasn’t the same thing as emotion. Perhaps it was emotion, then, that was at fault here.

“Sorry,” Harry said. “I shouldn’t have suggested this. I bet it’s not a good idea to cast spells when you’re really angry, or sad, or…”

“It’s all right,” Neville said, looking past him. “I’m glad it worked. Let’s keep going.” He scooted forward with a wince.

Harry gave him a sceptical look. “I don’t thin k it’d be good for you to cast any more magic after  all that . Maybe you should go sleep or write some homework,” he said.

Neville’s face scrunched up at the mention of homework. “Yeah,” he sighed, “I suppose you’re right. I’ll go take a nap.”

Neither of them brought up the hospital wing— it would be a fate worse than death to get castigated by Professor Snape after he’d already warned them.

Harry stood up and held out his left hand. Neville took it and let himself be heaved to his feet. They walked up to the seventh floor together, where Harry politely excused himself so  that Neville could preserve the secrecy of the  Gryffindor common room. 

He made for his own common room instead. There was nobody around as he reached the entrance, which was annoying, as the knocker was more easily dealt with by a team effort. Heaving a sigh, he stepped up to receive the question.

“Is it better to be kind or strong?”

_Why not both?_ he wanted to grumble, but that was unlikely to be well-received. He turned the question over a few times in his head. Strength seemed obviously useful, but kindness could win a person strong friends.

“Strong,” he finally decided. “Being kind is generally good, but it won’t always protect you or get you what you want. It’s risky, because a kind person has to rely on other people to help them. But being strong means you’re better off even if nobody helps you.”

Kindness hadn’t saved Harry yet. He still thought that the real answer was to be both things, but he couldn’t deny that he would have been much better off with strength instead.

“A strong argument,” the knocker said, pun obviously intended. Harry scowled as the door swung open. As he stepped through, he nearly walked into Penelope, who was pinning something to the bulletin board.

“Hi Harry,” she said, dodging out of the way. He stopped and glanced up at the parchment under her hand, which was an advertisement for charms club on Sunday afternoon.

“Astronomy tower rooftop?” Harry asked, reading the location.

“The rotunda is booked for choir on Sundays,” Penelope explained.

“What charm are we doing? Are you still using Elaine’s membership sheets?” Harry asked.

Penelope shook her head. “I’m making new ones. I’ll pass them out tomorrow. For the first meeting, I figured we could cover the ink animation charm.” She gestured to the advertisement and its dancing pineapple graphic.

The charm seemed interesting enough to Harry, but he was a little annoyed that it hadn’t been put to a vote. He was also disappointed that they wouldn’t be in the rotunda any more. The top of the astronomy tower took significantly longer to get to— he  had to set off five minutes earlier from lunch on Sunday.

Still, he could admit that the astronomy tower was a scenic  location . Harry had never been there during the day, so he stopped for a moment as he emerged from the narrow stone staircase to admire the direct view of the sparkling lake.  From his vantage point h e could see the giant squid churning up the water in the distance, waving its great tentacles lazily in the air.

“Fancy seeing you here,” said a teasing voice from right behind him.

Harry whipped around and saw Ginny leaned up casually against the parapet. He frowned.

“Shouldn’t I be saying that? You’re the one who’s new,” he said.

Ginny waved her hand. “I haven’t joined yet. I just came to shut Percy up. He kept going on about how this was the most valuable club Hogwarts had to offer, and he even tried to get Ron to show up. You know my other brother, Ron, right?”

Harry nodded. He knew enough to understand that Ron was not exactly the studious type.

Ginny rolled her eyes. “So tell me about charms club. What’s so good about it?”

“Didn’t you say Percy already told you?” Harry asked, glancing past her to where Percy was sitting stiffly in a corner. He made eye contact, and then the older Weasley stood up and stalked over.

“He said that you learn all sorts of charms. Any good hexes?” Ginny asked.

“We do not learn _hexes_ here,” Percy said as he approached, sniffing.

“Boring,” Ginny sang.

“Is Ginny bothering you?” Percy asked Harry, putting a hand on his sister’s shoulder.

“Rude. Is Percy bothering you? Because he’s bothering me,” Ginny said.

Harry looked awkwardly between them. He was saved from having to respond by a loud bang from Penelope’s wand.  White s parks shot up like fireworks, glittering subtly against the pale sky.

“Hi everyone. Let’s get started. Welcome to charms club. I was thinking we could start with introductions all around, and tell us your favourite charm or a charm you’re really hoping to learn. I’m Penelope Clearwater, the president,” Penelope said, gesturing for everybody to gather around the centre.

There wasn’t any proper seating, but all the returning students were used to the tower from Astronomy lessons and simply sat down on the sun-warmed stone. Harry looked around and found only a few unfamiliar faces—two Hufflepuff boys and a Slytherin girl. The notice for the club had probably gone up too late.

Vince wasn’t here either, though Harry wasn’t too surprised by that. He was still avoiding them for some unfathomable reason.

“My favourite charm is the scouring spell,” Penelope continued. “I know it sounds lame but it’s probably one of the top useful spells. You wouldn’t believe the kinds of messes people make on a daily business.”

Gemma laughed. “Just let them clean up after themselves! I’m Gemma Farley. My favourite charm is the reductor curse.” Percy shot her a disapproving look. She affected a wronged tone and said, “What? Nobody said it couldn’t be a dark charm. The reductor curse is also one of the top useful spells for disintegrating stuff you don’t like. Ugly vase? Dust. Horrible dress robes from the sixties? Dust! Homework you got a T on? That’s dust too. Uppity friends—”

“Okay, okay,” Percy yelled, holding up both hands. “I get it.” Gemma’s face fell at his truly offended tone, while Percy abruptly turned bright red and shrank back.

The Hufflepuff prefect, Gabriel, bravely broke the awkward silence with his own introduction, proceeding as if nothing had happened. His favourite charm was the cheering charm. Cassius favoured what was apparently a state-of-the-art braking charm used on all professional brooms. Hannah liked the knitting charm the best, and Neville the growth charm.

Then it was Harry’s turn. He had briefly had the dark thought of joking that his favourite charm was something horrible, like the killing curse, but then thought of something even better. “I’m Harry. My favourite charm is  _locomotor_ , because everything’s a variant of  _locomotor_ .”

All the returning members of charms club snorted at what had been Tonks’s catchphrase complaint.

“As I feared. This club’s full of swots,” Ginny muttered with a theatrical sigh. At a normal volume, she said, “I’m Ginny and my favourite charm is the bat-bogey hex. It turns your bogies into bats and they ooze out of your nose and dive-bomb you. What’s not to love about a spell like that?”

Hannah looked grossed out by this description. Harry was just trying to figure out how such a hex even worked, and who had come up with something so ridiculous. Most likely it was one of those illusory prank spells that created some larger-than-life effect, only to fade away completely in a few minutes with no evidence of it ever having happened. He imagined that actually having your bogies turned into bats in your nose would probably kill you.

“All right, so let’s get started on today’s charm. We work on a new charm every week, which you’ll all vote on. Since this is the first meeting, I’ve just picked a charm which is pretty neat, the ink animation charm. That’s how ink and paint in professional drawings is made,” Penelope said once they had gone all the way around the circle.

She opened her bag and produced a parchment, which she held up for everybody to see. There was an abstract depiction of a witch waving her wand at a box, which then seemed to explode into a shower of black lines.

“A lot of people think the charm is cast on the finished picture, which does work for subtle movements, but for the best results it’s supposed to be put it on the medium itself. It’s also used for the potion for developing photographs. The incantation is _liquidimotor_.” Penelope demonstrated the charm on an inkwell, dribbling some drops of ink onto some parchment, where they stained and then began to float about the page like motes of black snow.

“How do you use the ink?” Hannah asked, half-raising her hand. “Like, how do you get it to do what you want?”

“You just need to think about how you want it to move every time you draw a line. It’s kind of hard to explain, but not that hard to do,” Penelope said. “Just try it out after you make some.”

She took some pebbles out of her pockets and transfigured them into tiny shallow dishes for each student, into which she poured a measure of ink. Harry took out his own inkwell, which he rarely used, since he preferred writing with a self-inking quill.

Harry didn’t think that this animated ink spell was really the best first charm of the year. It had a fairly technically complex wand movement with three twists and a twirl, and out of the corner of his eye he had already noticed the Hufflepuff first years making a mess of the motion. Even Hannah seemed to be struggling a little with keeping the third twist tight. Surprisingly, Ginny executed it almost flawlessly on her first try, though her pronunciation was off.

“This isn’t so hard,” she said as her ink began to swirl sluggishly in its dish.

“Do you know a lot of spells already? Hexes?” Harry asked, remembering her earlier comment.

Ginny grinned at him. “Do I?” she said in an airy voice, and eyed Percy across the circle. Her brother ignored her in favour of charming his own ink.

Harry peered into his own inkwell and observed how the liquid had formed some irregular eddies. He cut a fresh tip on one of his regular quills and dipped it into the spelled ink, drawing an experimental line on the back of one of his returned Transfiguration essays. The line wiggled sinuously like a thin worm.

Neville, Harry noticed, seemed to be doing the wand movement incorrectly, which was strange, because normally Neville had the best wand form of anybody in their year, even Hermione. Harry wondered if his wand arm still hurt, and immediately felt a stab of guilt. While nobody was looking, he surreptitiously pointed his wand at his own inkwell from an oblique angle so that Neville’s dish was in the line of fire. After all, if magic didn’t interact with anything until it gathered into a spell, then it stood to reason that he could charm anything in his line of sight even if there was some other object in the way.

“ _Liquidimotor_ ,” Harry whispered. Twist, twist, twist, twirl. He hid a grin behind his arm as Neville blinked in surprise at the swirling dish in front of him.

Hannah also got the spell just then and immediately stole Harry’s old essay to doodle on. She quickly produced the outlines of a gigantic badger snatching an eagle out of the sky.

“Rude, but it looks nice,” Harry said, admiring the flexing of the strokes as the eagle flapped its wings frantically.

“It looks weird,” Hannah said, frowning. She shrugged and proceeded to draw more animals, until the essay had been transformed into a hectic menagerie skittering through lanes of static text.

Harry had already lost interest in the day’s charm. Now that Hermione had shared her study strategy with him, he couldn’t help thinking that charms club was a waste of time. It wasn’t true—the club was  a fun way to spend time with his friends—but it wasn’t as if they learned anything he couldn’t study on his own. After all, they had to be charms that even first years could cast, which limited the difficulty.

“Aren’t you going to try it out?” Hannah asked him, flipping over the parchment and presenting him an unmarred corner. Harry shrugged.

“I can’t draw,” he said.

“Anybody can draw,” Hannah insisted, pressing his quill into his hand. Harry stared at the paper.

“I don’t know what to do,” he muttered, dripping a wobbly blob of ink onto the page.

“You sound like Vince,” Hannah said crossly, and then looked around. “Where is he, anyway? I haven’t seen him since… you know.”

“He’s been avoiding us,” Harry said. “I don’t know if you noticed, since you have other friends, but he’s been going out of his way to not run into us.”

“Really? Why?” asked Hannah. “Does he think we’re mad at him or something?”

Harry shrugged. “Maybe he’s embarrassed. Couldn’t exactly ask him. Anyway, Neville and I came up with a plan. You know that spell he was practising? We’re going to help him learn it. Then he can stop moping or whatever he’s doing.”

Hannah shot him an incredulous look. “Didn’t Snape say—didn’t  _Neville_ agree that he shouldn’t have been doing that spell?”

Harry tried to smile reassuringly, waving off her concerns. “We looked it up. It’s fine. Vince was just doing it wrong. I already got it to work.”

“You already—Harry!” Hannah hissed.

“What?” he asked innocently.

Hannah opened her mouth, closed it, and finally grumbled something unintelligibly. Then she said, “So if he’s avoiding us, how are we going to find him? Get him at dinner?”

Harry shook his head. “He’s been skipping meals too,” he said.

“Vince has been skipping meals?” Hannah repeated. Harry grimaced.

“Yeah. There’s definitely something wrong with him, don’t you think?” he said. Hannah nodded, her lips pressed into a flat line.

“Maybe we can ask Gemma?” Neville suggested, glancing over to the Slytherin prefect. Harry followed his gaze, considering whether she was likely to know the whereabouts of a second year. As he glanced over, Gemma suddenly sprang to her feet and stumbled back into the parapet. A white flash of light exploded in front of her with a bang.

“What the hell, Percy?” she demanded. Harry blinked rapidly, trying to clear the stars out of his eyes.

“Sorry, sorry,” Percy muttered. He was crawling around on the ground, trying to gather shards of porcelain and stone manually. Gemma gave him an appalled look before she waved her wand and vanished the mess.

“Did I see that right?” Ginny whispered at a not particularly low volume. “Perfect Percy messed up a spell?”

Percy’s ears were alarmingly red as he hauled himself to his feet and dusted his robes off. He was still apologising left and right.

“It’s all right, Perce. It happens,” Penelope said, reaching out to pat his shoulder, but he ducked under her hand and ran for the stairs, letting the door slam shut behind him. She stared after him, looking bewildered.

“What an idiot,” said Gemma. Penelope glared at her, and she added an insincere, “Oh, sorry.”

“He’s been having a rough week,” Penelope muttered.

“It’s the first week of school!” said Gemma. Penelope still looked very uncertain, and Gemma clapped her on the shoulder. “Don’t even think of going after him. You have a club to run.”

“I—right. I’ll talk to him later,” Penelope said. She glanced at the small crater the backfired spell had left and repaired the damage with a grimace of concentration.

“Can any spell blow up like that?” Neville asked, his voice a little high. “I thought with charms it’s more like Baruffio and the buffalo, not explosions.”

Harry held back a snort, remembering how traumatised Neville had been last year by Flitwick’s warning tales about pronunciation.

“I think the Baruffio thing happens when you’re not focused on the right thing, or if you accidentally say a completely different spell. Backfiring happens when you don’t concentrate hard enough,” Harry whispered to him.

Still, nobody was as eager to go back to trying the spell after that, so Penelope decided to adjourn the meeting and hand out the protean-charmed membership sheets. They looked pretty much the same as the ones from last year to Harry.

“Hey Gemma,” Hannah said as everyone queued up to go down the spiral stairs. “Have you seen Vince around?”

“Yeah. He is in my house,” said Gemma, eyebrows raised.

“Today, I mean,” Hannah clarified, frowning. Gemma hummed.

“I might have. I can’t remember,” she finally said.

“Well that was unhelpful,” Harry mumbled as Hannah returned to his side.

“What now? It’s not like we know where the Slytherin common room is, so we can’t just wait for him there,” she said. “He has to turn up to meals eventually, right?”

“I wanted to find him today, while we have free time,” Harry said, an idea occurring to him. “Maybe we can use divination?”

Hannah looked at him flatly.

“I’m serious,” Harry said, taking his tarot deck out of his pocket. The wind ruffled his hair threateningly, and he thought better of handling loose cards on an open rooftop. “Let’s go inside first.”

“Since when do you know divination?” Hannah asked. “Is that even real magic?”

“Since summer, and of course it’s real. It’s a third year elective,” Harry said.

“My gran says it’s a wishy-washy subject,” Neville mumbled.

“Your gran says herbology is a wishy-washy subject,” Harry pointed out, leaving Neville torn between defending his grandmother and his favourite subject.

Their usual classroom was on the other side of the castle, so Harry paused at the base of the astronomy tower to look around for some flat surface. He headed for the nearest window, where there was a generous foot of stone sill, and set his box of cards down.

“How does it work?” Hannah asked, still sceptical.

“Each of the cards means something, and you just flip one at a time to show past, present, and future, which cause each other,” Harry said, doing just that.

The Dementor, reversed. Eleven of wands, reversed. Five of swords.

“Is that a dementor?” Neville asked with a shudder. Harry hadn’t paid much attention to the card before, but the illustration really was lifelike. The effect was somewhat ruined by its being upside-down.

“Yeah. It means a loss of something important. But it’s reversed, so I guess that means something important was restored in the past. And eleven of wands is also reversed, so that’s something forbidden. Well we know Vince is trying the spell and he’s not supposed to, so that probably means he’s trying it again right now. In the future is the five of swords, which is some kind of social consequence. A relationship problem,” Harry said somewhat haltingly. Swords wasn’t a suit he saw often in his own readings.

“A relationship problem? Not with us?” Hannah demanded. “There’s no way, right?”

“Well, it could be with his other friends,” Harry said, though he couldn’t see why Vince’s curse practice should have any bearing on his relationship with Draco and Goyle.

“It’s not set in stone, is it?” Neville asked worriedly. “We can stop it from happening?”

Harry gathered the cards in his suddenly sweaty palms, as if sweeping away the evidence would erase it from memory. “Actually, what the cards say sort of does have to happen. But we don’t know for sure we read them correctly, so our interpretation of it doesn’t have to be what happens.”

“This is rubbish,” said Hannah, crossing her arms. Harry hastily shoved his deck back into his pocket.

“We still don’t know where Vince is,” Neville pointed out.

“We know he’s practising the curse again,” Harry said a little uncertainly. Tarot was vague, but it usually wasn’t this vague. He should have laid more cards down, but it was too late for that now.

“He could be doing that anywhere,” Hannah said. “Look, he has to eat or go back to his common room to sleep some time. We don’t know exactly where it is, but the Slytherin common room is somewhere in the dungeons, I think, past ours, so I can ask some other ‘Puffs to keep an eye out. Or maybe we can send him a letter telling him to meet us tonight after dinner.”

“I don’t think owls deliver inside the castle during the day,” Harry said. “It’s only at breakfast.”

“He’ll probably be at dinner, won’t he? He can’t go all day without eating,” Neville said, looking queasy at the thought.

“Yeah,” said Hannah. “You know, I bet he hasn’t done his homework yet. I’m still not done with Snape’s essay. Let’s meet up after dinner anyway, whether or not Vince shows. I’ve got to go to gobstones club now.”

Harry wrinkled his nose at the mention of that horrible game. “Have fun,” he  muttered as Hannah waved goodbye.

“Don’t you have racing or something?” Neville asked him, and Harry realised that it was, in fact, Sunday. He cursed.

“You’re right. Thanks Neville. I completely forgot,” he said, making for the nearest staircase. It wasn’t as if broom racing practices were mandatory, so he would have skipped if it had meant fixing whatever problem Vince had, but it seemed like that was at a dead end.

Still, something didn’t sit right with him about the reading. Why had it just told him what he had already known or could have guessed? He had been trying to divine the present and not the future, hadn’t he? The meaning of the past card, apparently of enough importance to necessitate one of the major arcana, also remained unknown. The cards hadn’t really given him any hint to where Vince could be.

Harry paused in his train of thought. No. That wasn’t it. The cards could not lie—the problem was that he had interpreted them as if the question were, ‘What is Vince doing?’, but that wasn’t right at all—what he had really asked was, ‘Where is Vince?’ And the answer had been right there.

Vince had been somewhere that had been lost, but was restored. Now he was somewhere forbidden, which would lead to him being somewhere socially unpleasant— somewhere with no friends.

As Harry exited the castle and turned in the direction of the broom shed, he was immediately struck with understanding—Vince was in the Forbidden Forest. Why he was there was still unclear, but it was going to cause him to be  _somewhere friendless_ , and where could that be but outside of Hogwarts? Vince was going to get expelled! Or worse, what if he was going to get put in Azkaban?

Harry shook his head, trying not to get ahead of himself. He stared into the dark line of trees in the distance, sure at least that it had to be the right location. It was such a good place for practising curses without risk of discovery. 

It was also a good place to get hurt and never be found.

Moving quickly, Harry signed a broom out from Madam Hooch and cruised over the lake at low altitude, making for the edge of the forest where the obstacle course for racing had already been set up. He pulled up sharply, waiting a beat to allow the racers to pass overhead, before darting after them, swerving off to the side at the low point of the course and shooting into the cover of the trees.

Lighting down on a wide branch, he decided it was time to put Hermione’s spell-learning strategy to its first real test. He had strategically begun memorising the incantations and wand movements of spells he had seen, but not used before. It seemed easier than starting with completely unknown spells.

“ _Disillusio_ ,” he whispered, whipping his wand sharply above his head as if cracking an egg. Something cold and slimy seemed to land on his crown and drip down the back of his neck. His glasses and nose disappeared from his vision, and when he looked down he could no longer see himself. Disorientated, he stumbled, almost toppling off the tree—only his firm grip on the broomstick handle kept him upright.

Movement disturbed the illusion, and Harry saw a distinct ripple of colour in the shape of his arm, before everything settled again. Practice probably would improve the spell, but for a first try, it had worked well enough. Carefully, he applied the same treatment to his broomstick, relieved when it worked. Enchanted items normally couldn’t be further charmed with charms of the same type, but it seemed there had been no appearance alteration incorporated into the broomstick. Satisfied with this disguise, he took off again.

Now what? He scratched the back of his head with some chagrin. He really hadn’t thought this through. What was he going to do, canvass the whole forest?

Vince wouldn’t have gone too far in, Harry reasoned, so he would stick to the perimeter and look around.

About five minutes into the search, just when he was beginning to feel even more foolish, something whizzed by his ear and he heard a crisp clunk behind him. His head whipped around and he saw a feathered shaft—an arrow—sticking out of a nearby tree.

“Show yourself! That was your last and only warning, trespasser,” a deep voice bellowed, and Harry felt his neck crack as he looked back too quickly, heart pounding in his throat. A barrel-chested man whose torso melded seamlessly into the sturdy body of a black stallion aimed unerringly at him with the tip of a new arrow nocked on a gnarled bow.

“ _Finite_ ,” Harry muttered hastily, gripping his wand tightly in his sweaty palm. What spells did he know that could block a flying arrow? None, he discovered upon a quick review of his repertoire. He should have studied the shield charm. If fighting wasn’t an option, it at least looked like talking might be. “Please, sorry, I didn’t mean to trespass. I’m looking for my friend. He’s a student like me.”

“Your friend was a fool to come here, and you a greater fool to follow,” the centaur said, snorting and stamping his front hooves. Thankfully, he lowered his bow. “Since you are but a foal, I will forgive you this once. Our territory spans the pine forest—we do not welcome wizards. I have not seen your friend. He must be beyond our borders.”

The centaur gestured to his right with an arrow loosely in hand, towards the gamekeeper’s hut. Harry nodded uneasily. He had never gone far in that direction, past the quidditch pitch. Was the forest there even part of Hogwarts?

“Thank you,” he said, nudging his broom to turn.

“One more thing,” said the centaur, almost softly. Harry glanced back to see him looking into the distance and followed his gaze to see the moon hanging low in the afternoon sky, a pale blemish. “You should be more careful. Fate hangs about you like moss on a tree.” He tossed his head casually to indicate a nearby example. Before Harry could say anything, he reared up, turned around, and darted off into the trees.

Unsettled, Harry disillusioned himself again.  S lid ing his wand back into his pocket,  he  gripped his broom tightly with both hand s and leaned  forward s, shooting  off towards the hut that had once been Hagrid’s.

He saw that the windows were  dark as he flew by, careful to stay at the very edge of the forest to avoid further unsavoury encounters. Hagrid’s garden was overgrown, and a mass of cobwebs glinted silver over the charred hole in the thatched roof. Evidently, Mr Ogg had not taken up residence in the vacated hut after all.

Harry slowed as he flew into uncharted territory, descending somewhat for a better view of the forest floor. Vince had really picked the most abandoned corner of the grounds to sneak off to, if he was even here. Despite his conviction in what he had read in the cards, Harry was beginning to doubt the wisdom of this search. Perhaps he should go back and inform a teacher instead.

But then Vince might be expelled, he reminded himself. He redoubled his efforts, stopping every few metres to listen for rustling and look for any sign of movement.

A puff of mist clouded his vision, and Harry reached for his glasses in confusion, suddenly cognisant of how warm his breath felt in his face. His fingers were stiff. He felt a twinge of pain as they met the icy rims of his spectacles.

Underneath him, his broom suddenly began to wobble and flicker into view. Harry scrambled to land, falling hard on one leg as the charms seemed to give out just before he reached the ground. Rubbing his glasses on his robe, he hastily shoved them back onto his face with one hand, the other reaching for his wand.

A dementor floated out of the trees  almost languidly , its shroud fluttering in the nonexistent wind. Dark mist rolled languidly after it like a miasma.

Harry shuddered and shut his eyes, focusing inwardly as the faint sound of screaming reached his ears, scratchy and distant as if out of a damaged record. A white light shone in his mind’s eye. Confused, he blinked rapidly.

A shining horn. Blue blood. A fallen unicorn, beautiful even in tragedy. 

Chest seizing painfully, he dropped the horn.

No—his wand! Harry fought to keep his grip on reality, falling down as he tried to recover his fallen wand. The dementor was right in front of him now, the smoky edge of its cloak tickling his frozen toes.

Why was he looking for his wand anyway? It wasn’t as if he knew any spells to repel dementors. He probably couldn’t cast the patronus charm at all. Petri had said that most dark wizards couldn’t.

The dementor gripped his shoulder in its clammy, scabby hand. Harry jerked away weakly, taking a gasping breath. He had to find Vince. Had the dementors got to Vince? Was he too late? No. Occlumency, he needed occlumency.

He thought of Barty’s grinning face, his patience and his understanding in the face of Harry’s limited progress. He thought of how the man smiled even as the Dark Lord tore through his mind and forced him to cry silver tears. If he couldn’t quite stop thinking, he could at least think nice, neutral thoughts. He studied the dementor’s shroud, so close to his face now. It was translucent and at certain angles Harry thought he could make out tiny veins. Was it not a garment, but actually part of the creature itself? Thoughtlessly, he reached out to touch it.

He almost expected his fingers to pass right through, but they didn’t. The material was soft and incredibly smooth, like polished ice. It pulsed beneath his touch and extended to wrap curiously about him. The searing cold bit into his flesh. He wrenched his hand away to see an angry red lash across his palm.

The dementor was no longer advancing or attempting to grab him, so Harry carefully gathered his wand and stood up, only to see that three other dementors had joined the first one to completely surround him. Still, they hung there limply like tattered sheets on a clothesline, not making any threatening movements.

Harry took a deep breath, pausing as he tasted a vague curiosity. He recognised the feeling as foreign, just  like  Silviu’s emotions through their bond or the Dark Lord’s through possession, but somehow it seemed to be located in the back of his throat, rather than in his head or chest or gut like most emotions. Another experimental inhale confirmed that he wasn’t just imagining things.

He blinked.

“Why am I here?” he muttered. That was what the feeling in his throat seemed to be saying. He licked his lips. “I’m looking for my friend,” he said, staring up into the first dementor’s shroud searchingly. It was dark inside, and he could make out no features besides a misshapen chin. They didn’t really seem to have eyes or ears, only a gaping mouth, if he recalled his close encounter with them on the train correctly. He envisioned Vince and the blasting curse, trying to pass the thought out of his mind the way he did with Silviu.

The dementor made a rasping sound, and Harry belatedly remembered to breathe in with his mouth. This time a burst of frustration and desperation seared his palate, followed by a gentler inquisitiveness that seemed to ask, “This?”

They probably couldn’t see, Harry realised. Since they thrived on emotions and souls, it stood to reason that that was how they navigated the world as well.

“Maybe,” Harry said, mustering up exaggerated uncertainty. It drained away instantly, threatening to be replaced by the freezing grip of fear and screams and blood, but he exhaled harshly until his chest ached with real pain and brought him firmly back to the present.

The dementor did not ‘say’ anything for a long time, long enough that Harry had to begin counting the seconds in order to keep his trepidation at bay. He got to one hundred twenty-five before the dementors spiralled into the sky as one and began floating off.

‘Follow us,’ they seemed to say, so Harry hobbled after them on frozen limbs, barely retaining the presence of mind to grab the broomstick, which dragged on the ground without a spark of life.

They led him straight through a dense thicket of thorns, against which the severing charm did laughably little. Grimacing, Harry gripped his wand more tightly and thrust it forward.

“ _Confringo!_ ”

The spell shot into the brambles, blasting them apart. Harry reeled, beset by a horrifying, peculiar sense of weakness that was neither physical nor mental, almost a phantom cramp somewhere behind his navel. Of course. Dementors could suck the very magic out of the air if they remained long enough, and they had been patrolling the borders of Hogwarts for days. If he kept casting, he might actually run out.

The dementors had not waited for him, but it was easy enough to follow the trail of unnatural frost they had left behind on wilting leaves and the echo of despair that sought purchase in his carefully focused mind. Finding Vince. That was all he was allowed to think about.

Vince dead. Vince with his soul sucked out. Ever grimmer scenarios played out tauntingly in his mind as he forged ahead. That was fine. No matter what had happened, he had to go on. He pushed through the knee-high undergrowth, wincing as thorns caught on his robes and spiderwebs tickled his chest. He clutched his wand helplessly, too afraid of that indescribably awful feeling of depleting his magic to use it again.

He found Vince leaned up against a fallen log, curled into a tight ball and staring vacantly ahead. Half a dozen dementors hung over him in the air, as if standing vigil. They stirred as  Harr y approached, and he took a cautious breath.

Foreign curiosity tickled his throat, mixed with the scent of damp leaves and stone. It was longing, the desire to know… what was this thing, so complex and vibrant? They wanted to understand. They wanted to know  _everything_ about it. Even the barest taste was so tantalising. But could they?

Harry swallowed thickly, horror pooling in his gut. It was his own horror, not the insidious touch of the dementors’ aura. They were thinking about Vince. They were deliberating on whether to eat him.

“No!” he cried, though he knew they couldn’t hear. The dementors tasted his presence anyway, fluttering and turning, some of them swooping down to enshroud his vision in smoky darkness.

There were so many. How were there suddenly so many? Cold hands and colder shrouds reached for him, sinking into his skin and his mind. He was drowning in screams, suffocating in abjection.

One of them held him fast and sucked in a deep, rattling breath. Its hood was down, revealing its monstrous, featureless visage. The haze cleared from Harry’s mind for a moment, and he stared up in clear-eyed terror.

Then the feeling drained from him in a very familiar way. He relaxed, opening his mouth to inhale deeply despite every instinct screaming at him to keep it tightly shut. He tasted only curiosity, voracious, ravenous curiosity. All he felt now was calm determination. His hand came up and grasped the bony wrist of his captor. He pressed and twisted with sudden fury. Agonising fire shot through his left side, incredible strength surging along with it.

The dementor’s arm snapped like a toothpick and he was suddenly free. Instead of trying to get away, he only took a step back, focus unwavering. The dementor went stock-still, its shroud ceasing to flutter, as if it were surprised. It touched its broken arm with its other hand and popped it back into place with a sickening crunch. Harry tasted the air with a fluttering tongue, like a snake. If anything, the curiosity had grown even stronger.

“Share without giving, Harry,” Harry murmured, raising his left hand, which throbbed like needles had been driven into every pore. He wiped gently at his face, which felt wet. Had he been crying? But it was silvery memory and not tears that decorated his fingers when he pulled them away. Reaching up decisively, he touched the dementor’s scabby cheek. He could barely feel the cold through the stabbing pain as his hand snaked forwards into the depths of the hood, moving behind its head.

It opened its mouth, and he pulled down, pressing its face to his temple.

He was in two places at once. Incomprehensible, overwhelming sights and sounds assaulted him. A dark hallway. A dark cupboard. A red-faced woman. Aunt Petunia. A dirty street on a muggy summer day, ancient, boxy cars trundling down the lanes. Uncle Vernon’s sleek company car pulling out from the driveway. The sea breeze on a scenic cliffside. A round-faced, smirking boy. Dudley and Piers chasing him through crunching mulch. A rabbit hanging by its twisted neck from the rafters. Dumbledore’s white boots descending the steps. Dumbledore with short red hair, recognisable only by his half-moon spectacles and twinkling smile. People, places, and emotions flashed by with ever greater speed and intensity until Harry thought he would choke, had he had any control over his breathing in the first place.

But his body was still firmly in the grasp of Lord Voldemort, so he simply bore the onslaught with  stoicism and then let his frostbitten fingers slip from the dementor’s hood. The last image, crisp and clear in his mind, was that of a killing curse striking a fluttering black form. It did not quite touch it, nor did it exactly pass through—like a falling clump of earth suddenly hitting water, it sunk in and then dissipated. The dementor in his mind’s  eye  convulsed and vomited up a stream of black sludge.

All the dementors around him recoiled, fluttering in agitation as they made distance by floating up above the treetops. This suited Harry just fine. He wiped his fingers on his robe and stepped forward leisurely, nudging Vince with his foot. The boy did not respond.

“ _Rennervate_ ,” he cast, and Vince lurched, looking around wildly. Harry stumbled at the same time, finding himself suddenly in control of his body again. He met Vince’s blank gaze with bewilderment.

Lord Voldemort had just saved his  life—both their lives, with little pomp and circumstance, as if it were simply an errand to be run.

Shaking his head  and trying to calm his harsh breathing, Harry reached out to grab Vince’s hand. The other boy flinched, but he did not let up.

“Come on, Vince. We have to get out of here,” Harry said, jerking his head to indicate the hovering dementors. They were hesitant now, but for how long? He tugged insistently, but Vince’s arm felt like a limp noodle, and Harry knew he had no chance of dragging the boy by brute strength. Furthermore, his left arm still throbbed fiercely. What had the Dark Lord done to it?

The lingering threat of the dementors overcame his hesitation, and Harry waved his wand. “ _Mobilicorpus_ ,” he muttered, bracing himself for pain. But there was hardly more than a twinge behind his navel, slight enough that he had perhaps imagined it. With a relieved sigh, he ran back to the other side of the clearing, retrieved his broom, and hurried towards the castle with Vince in tow, resolutely not looking back.

The wooden handle in his loose grasp lightened by the by as he approached the edge of the forest, and soon it was straining to float into the air. Harry shouldered its diminished weight, glancing to Vince who was hovering alongside him like a limp puppet. He wasn’t in any condition to fly.

When they reached the abandoned gamekeeper’s hut, Harry lowered Vince to the ground and looked him over in concern, carefully taking his hand. It was clammy and a blotchy red, like frozen meat. He tried casting the hot-air charm, but it seemed to have only a superficial effect.

Chocolate, Madam Pomfrey had used chocolate! Hastily, Harry shoved his hand into his pocket, grimacing as he discovered how hard it was to distinguish things by touch when touching everything hurt. He put his wand away and used his right hand instead to produce the block of chocolate he had never eaten.  Peeling back the golden wrapper,  he broke  off a generous chunk.

“Eat this,” he told Vince, waving it in front of his friend’s face and then pressing it into his hand.

Vince perked up, though the look on his face was still lost, and he shoved the chocolate into his mouth. Perhaps he knew how to eat sweets by instinct, Harry thought. He took a bit of chocolate for himself. It did nothing for his arm, but the rest of him felt marginally warmer.

With a horrible groan, Vince seemed to come back to himself. He rubbed his arms vigorously and smacked his lips.

“Harry?” he asked, blinking rapidly. “You—the dementors—how? Actually, wait, can I have a bit more chocolate?”

Bemused, Harry broke out into a relieved smile nonetheless. “Sure,” he said, passing the entire block over to his friend. Vince devoured it at an impressive pace. Harry almost got sick watching him.

Vince stared up at him with glistening eyes. “Thanks, mate. If you hadn’t come… it was awful, Harry, I saw—it was awful.” He shook his head. “How did you find me?”

“I used divination and I found out you were in the Forbidden Forest. And you’re going to be somewhere friendless in the future. Away from us. Do you know what that means? I thought you would get expelled, but nobody knows you were in the forest, so it can’t be that, right?” Harry asked, the words stumbling over themselves to leave his mouth. The unsettling thought occurred to him that he shouldn’t have divined for somebody else without asking. He had read fateful words, and that meant that they had to happen. Regardless of what he did, Vince was going to be somewhere bad in the near future.

“Not expelled,” Vince said, though he didn’t sound happy about that at all. “My father’s going to take me out of Hogwarts.”

“What? Why?” Harry demanded.

“He says they don’t teach anything useful here, that I basically just wasted last year. I barely convinced him to let me come back,” Vince muttered. Harry winced at the thought of what kind of marks the other boy must have taken home.

“But you’re here now, right? I can help you study, get better marks,” Harry said, but Vince shook his head.

“He’s right, don’t you think? We really don’t learn anything worth knowing in lessons. Just useless tricks like making things fly and dance, and sparks and changing bugs into random stuff,” he muttered.

“But that’s to lay the groundwork for our magic,” Harry protested. “Then we can do advanced things later. And levitating things is plenty useful. _Locomotor_ is extremely useful too—you know that. What spells does your father think are useful, then? The blasting curse?” Harry couldn’t keep derision out of his tone. All spells, he was beginning to understand, were rather useless, in that they all had a very specific application. The trick was to know a wide variety of spells and thereby have the right spell for the right occasion.

Vince shook his head. “Not spells at all. Just magic. Look, you don’t get it, because it all comes easy to you. You can just get spells out of a book and do whatever you want. Well I can’t—I can barely do magic and I can’t even get most spells. What is my father supposed to think when his son’s basically a squib?”

A sheen of desperation glinted in his eyes.

“You’re not a squib,” Harry said firmly. “I can help. Look, just tell me what you’re trying to learn and I can help! _We_ can help. Hannah, Neville, and I—we’re your friends. We were looking for you to help you with the blasting curse. Neville and I studied up on it. Are you still working on it?”

Vince stared at him silently for a long time. Finally, he shook his head.

“The blasting curse wasn’t enough. I need a stronger curse,” he said.

Bewildered, Harry asked, “For what? Impressing your dad?”

“No. Well, yes, but no. For feeling magic. The blasting curse wasn’t strong enough,” Vince said.

“Feeling magic?” Harry repeated. A disquieting realisation came upon him. “You mean, you did it on purpose? Overextended yourself because you _want_ magical sensitivity? For it to hurt when you do magic?”

“Not hurt,” Vince said hurriedly. “That’s different. Just to feel it, like an extra sense. You only get that when you cast powerful magic, and that’s how you learn to control it better. You can’t control what you can’t even feel.”

Harry flexed the fingers in his left hand, sending a sharp prickle radiating up his entire arm. He was appalled by how simultaneously little and much sense Vince’s argument made. How  _did_ he control magic? He didn’t. Not directly. He could control his will and intent, and he could say words and wave his wand, but it was true that he had no sense of the magic itself. 

But wasn’t that enough? He could achieve results, and results were what mattered. If he could just show Vince how to do the same thing, he wouldn’t have to go to dangerous lengths to achieve basic competence.

“There are other ways,” Harry said. “We have to try. We won’t let your dad take you out of school, Vince. I promise.”

Vince looked up at him doubtfully, and Harry knew that the other boy didn’t believe him.

“Even if there’s no other way, we’ll still help. We’ll make sure you don’t get hurt. We’ll do it together. Just don’t run off by yourself any more, all right? You could have died.”

He would have died, too, if it weren’t for Lord Voldemort. Harry flexed his hand again, as if doubtful that it belonged to him. Perhaps he was a little curious. He had felt magic today, felt its absence as it left his body without finding any replacement, felt its presence in every cell of his flesh and bone when the Dark Lord had supernaturally strengthened it. What would it be like to know so precisely what he was doing with every spell, as if the magic were an extra limb?

“Okay,” Vince whispered. “Thanks again for finding me. You’re right. I would’ve died. I was—I was so sure I was already dead. It was so empty.”

His mouth remained open after he finished speaking, and after a tense moment, he belched loudly. Caught by surprise, Harry couldn’t help bursting into laughter, and Vince, too, broke out into a sheepish grin.

“I’m really hungry all of a sudden,” he said. “Is it time for dinner yet?”

Despite feeling like he had been in the woods for hours, Harry discovered that it was barely three o’clock in the afternoon.

“Not yet. Let’s make a plan,” Harry said.

Vince seemed lost. “A plan?”

“For how we’re going to stop your dad from taking you out of Hogwarts. We work backwards. What do you need to do to show him that you’re learning what he wants you to?” Harry asked.

“I told you already, feeling magic. Like a proper Crabbe,” Vince muttered this last part, looking down so far that his voice was muffled in the folds of his chin.

“Wait. So this is something that only your family can do?” Harry asked. Vince shrugged.

“It’s a Crabbe family gift, but a lot of people have it. Everybody’s related, see. I know Draco can do it. I think his great grandmother was a Crabbe,” he explained.

“But if you either have it or not, how can your dad expect you to learn anything about it at Hogwarts?” Harry demanded.

“I have it,” Vince said, looking up and drawing back slightly. “I’m just not good at it. The more powerful magic you do, the better you can get at it, so that’s what I need to do.”

Harry seriously did not think that overextending oneself was the right way of going about improving this supposed ability.

“And Draco does a lot of advanced magic?” he asked, sceptical. Vince shook his head.

“He doesn’t need to. He’s a Malfoy,” he said, as if that explained everything. Maybe it did.

“Maybe you can practise feeling magic directly, instead of trying random spells,” Harry suggested. “Actually, maybe there’s something on this in the library. Is there a name for it? A fancy name.” He hoped Vince wasn’t about to say magical sensitivity or hypergoetisis, because he was sure that that was a medical condition, not an ability.

“Yeah, heliopathy,” Vince said, screwing up his face.

“Heliopathy. Okay. I’ll go look it up, and we can meet up after dinner to talk about it. Hannah, Neville, and I were going to meet anyway to do homework. Don’t ditch us this time, yeah?” Harry said. He smiled tentatively.

“Yeah,” Vince agreed, and smiled back.


	46. Heliopath

Harry had just cast _aparecium_ for the twelfth time in search of the elusive ‘heliopathy’ keyword, to no avail, when somebody whispered from right behind him, “Are you looking for information about heliopaths?”

He jumped a foot in the air and found himself pointing his wand threateningly at a slip of a Ravenclaw girl—Luna, he thought her name was.

“Sorry,” he muttered, pocketing his wand. “Yes, I am. Am I looking in the wrong place?” He glanced at the placard on the end of the row: ‘Defence Against the Dark Arts’.

“There won’t be anything in here. My daddy says the Minister for Magic has suppressed the information so he can build an army of heliopaths in secret,” she said with wide, serious eyes.

Harry frowned. That was an unwelcome revelation. “Oh. Does your dad work for the Ministry?”

Luna shook her head. “He’s the editor of the Quibbler,” she told him, reaching into her pocket and producing a rumpled magazine which she held up proudly with both hands. Harry frowned deeper at the sight of the multicoloured cover, emblazoned with a variety of alarming headlines like, ‘AZKABAN BREAKOUT ENABLED BY BLISTERWUMP INFESTATION’ and ‘ROTFANG CONSPIRACY STRIKES AGAIN’.

Uncertain how he should respond to the strange periodical, he asked, “Can you tell me about heliopaths, then?”

“Of course,” said Luna. “They’re spirits of fire—great towers of flame that devour everything in their path. Nobody’s seen one in the wild in centuries because they’ve been part of the Minister’s private army for generations…”

Harry wondered now if Vince had given him the wrong name entirely.

“Actually, I don’t think that’s what I’m looking for,” he said, tentatively holding up hand to pause Luna’s enthusiastic description. “I must have got the wrong term. I was looking for a special ability to sense magic. It runs in some families.”

Luna just nodded along, completely unperturbed. “Oh yes, that’s what they _want_ you to think. Heliopaths can disguise themselves as wizards, you see, and that’s part of what makes them so tricky to find. But the one thing they can’t hide is their attraction to wild magic, so they pass it off as a blood gift.”

Harry was beginning to suspect that Luna might be full of it. Vince had thus far shown no signs of being a giant fireball, and the possibility that Draco was one was even more remote. And now that he thought about it, hadn’t she been talking about some other imaginary creature the other day at lunch? However, she still looked entirely serious, so Harry felt it would be rude to contradict her.

“Right,” he muttered, looking down. At this point, he noticed that her bare toes were peeking out from the hems of her too-short robes. “Why aren’t you wearing shoes?”

Luna followed his gaze and wiggled her toes. “Walking around barefoot is liberating,” she said.

Harry, remembering that the Dark Lord did not wear shoes either, could not dismiss this opinion outright. He shrugged. “I’ve never tried it.”

“Your shoes don’t mysteriously disappear sometimes?” Luna asked, her eyes wide and earnest, so that Harry had to consider the possibility seriously.

“No. They’re not enchanted,” Harry finally said. Self-walking shoes sounded good in principle but were probably horrible in practice.

Luna smiled brightly. “Enchanted shoes! Wouldn’t that be lovely? But what would they do? Perhaps they could always point north.”

“I imagine it would be a bit hard to walk,” Harry said, and got the image of somebody crab-walking because their shoes refused to rotate.

“But you’d never get lost,” said Luna, nodding sagely. “A worthwhile trade-off.”

“Hmm,” Harry mumbled.

“You don’t have to agree with me,” Luna told him, staring him directly in the eye. “Most people don’t, so I’m used to it.”

She didn’t sound offended at all, so Harry was forced to conclude that she meant it. He tried to smile, but he felt a muscle twitch in his face, so he moved to focus on the matter at hand instead.

“Why do you think it’s better to never get lost at the cost of not being able to turn your feet?” he asked.

Luna’s eyes twinkled. “Well, that wouldn’t be the best design, would it? I imagine the shoes would only _try_ to point north without forcing the wearer to turn around. How does that sound?”

Someone cleared their throat, and Harry whirled around guiltily to find an older Ravenclaw at the end of the stacks—Patil, the ex-seeker.

“Sorry,” Harry whispered reflexively.

“You do realise that saying ‘point me’ makes your wand point north, right?” said Patil, raising an eyebrow.

“Oh.” Harry felt weirdly embarrassed, but Luna seemed delighted.

“Does it? Point me,” she said, holding her wand horizontally. It twitched in her loose grasp and she gasped. “I suppose we don’t need those shoes after all.”

“What happened to your shoes?” Patil asked, glancing down at Luna’s feet.

Luna shrugged.

Patil looked vaguely alarmed. “Did you blow them up experimenting?”

Unease flashed across her face for a moment before she shook her head. “Nothing so exciting,” she said. “I’ve simply lost them.”

Patil’s dumbfounded expression exactly reflected Harry’s feelings on how likely that story was.

“Perhaps I could summon them for you?” the seventh-year offered. “Ah…”

“Luna Lovegood,” said Luna, sticking out her hand at a low angle. Patil had to bend over to shake it.

“Varun Patil. We’re in the same house.”

“I’d noticed,” said Luna with a bright smile.

“And you… you’re in Padma’s year, right?” asked Patil, turning to Harry. “She’s my little cousin.”

Harry nodded and introduced himself.

“You don’t have to,” Luna told Patil. “I’m sure they’ll come back eventually.”

“It’s no trouble,” he said, raising his wand. Then he seemed to think better of casting spells in the library and gestured for them to follow him outside. “Do you have some general idea of where they might be?”

“Oh, they’ll be somewhere in Ravenclaw Tower,” Luna said. “The nargles never go too far.”

Looking a little puzzled, Patil nevertheless nodded and cried, “ _Accio_ Luna Lovegood’s shoes!”

With a faint pop, a pair of heavy-duty leather boots materialised in front of them and dropped to the floor with a solid thunk. Patil stared at them in consternation. “Sorry,” he began, but was cut off by Luna’s delighted cry.

“There you are!” She scooped up the boots and hugged them to her chest. “Thank you!”

“Those are your shoes, then?” Patil asked haltingly, but it was apparent enough that that was indeed the case.

Harry was bursting with questions of a different sort. “Was that a fifth series summoning charm? What was the wand movement? How do you summon something without having seen it beforehand?”

Patil mock-groaned. “You sound like a NEWT practice exam. Been reading ahead, have you? That was sixth series actually—it allows summoning with much less information, though it’s also much more likely to go wrong. It’s nice because you don’t even have to be able to identify the target by name. All it needs is a name that _someone_ could identify it by.”

“That’s brilliant,” said Harry, even though he knew the summoning charm in more than its most basic form was still beyond him. One could dream.

“Well, you’ve reminded me—I’d better get back to homework. I’ll see you two around,” Patil said as they reentered the library. He quickly disappeared behind a stack of books.

Harry remembered that he had got sidetracked from looking up heliopathy. He had to find something before dinner. Luna’s claims had been outlandish, but one thing she had said had given him an idea of what to look for. He wandered over to the history shelf.

“ _Aparecium_ blood gift,” he muttered. Faint light peeked out from underneath a handful of books. Harry grinned.

Later that evening, having lost all track of time and missed dinner, he barrelled through the ugly burgundy curtain into the classroom where his friends were waiting and slammed a pair of books down on a chair triumphantly. As it happened, it was one of the chairs he had blown up that morning and made only a superficial attempt to fix, so it promptly collapsed into rubble.

“The _Pure-Blood Directory_?” Hannah read upside-down, her eyebrows rising into her hairline.

“It’s for Vince. I found him earlier, and we talked,” Harry said, trying to be as vague as possible. He would leave it up to Vince whether he wanted to tell the others exactly what had happened. “Anyway, he finally explained why he was acting so weird. His dad threatened to take him out of Hogwarts if he didn’t get better at this one ability that his family has. So we’re going to help him out. You’re in, right?”

“Take him out of Hogwarts?” Hannah repeated, eyes widening. “That’s horrible. Of course we’ll help! Right Neville?”

“Yeah,” said Neville. “But how are we supposed to help with a blood gift? They’re, well, the point is that they run in the family, isn’t it? It’s extreme and all, but I sort of understand why his dad would want to teach him himself.”

Harry bent down and picked up the _Pure-Blood Directory_ , dusting it off with a few firm smacks that probably would have given Madam Pince an aneurysm. “It’s called heliopathy, and it shows up in several families, even if it’s supposed to come from the Crabbe family. There’s nothing to teach, anyway. It’s an affinity for powerful spells, and I think Vince just needs practice.”

“Never heard of it,” said Neville, frowning.

“Yeah, it was pretty hard to find,” Harry said. “These were the only two books that mentioned it explicitly. It’s not as obvious or flashy as metamorphmagic, I suppose.”

“I wouldn’t know what that was either if I hadn’t met Tonks,” Neville said. “When people say blood gift you usually think of parselmouths or seers.”

Harry shrugged, not so eager to reveal his parseltongue gift. According to the books he had just consulted, it was widely considered to be evil. He was lucky that everybody who knew he was a parselmouth was either as ignorant as he had been or also arguably evil.

Just then, Vince appeared in the door, poking his head awkwardly through the gap in the curtain. He looked nervous, so Harry smiled at him and waved him inside.

“Look, I found books on heliopathy,” he said, gesturing to the titles that Vince couldn’t read. Nonetheless, recognition, of the unpleasant sort, dawned on his features.

“That’s the list of the Sacred Twenty-Eight!” he cried, pointing his finger at the book in Harry’s hand.

“It’s that book?” Neville asked, frowning in disapproval. Harry stared back and forth between them, nonplussed.

“What does that mean?” He drew his wand. “ _Aparecium_ sacred twenty-eight.” A good portion of the last half of the book lit up.

“It’s a list of the purest of the pure. The houses that haven’t ever dirtied themselves with non-wizard blood,” Vince explained. Harry flipped to the very end of the book, where a final list was proudly featured within an elaborate gilt border. The first name stood out immediately.

“Abbott,” Harry read, raising an eyebrow at Hannah. “Isn’t your mum muggleborn?”

She nodded, frowning.

Neville sniffed. “That book’s really old, and it’s all codswallop anyway. Gran says there aren’t any families left that haven’t got some muggle blood in them.”

“That’s not true,” Vince said, looking up sharply. “Most of the Sacred Twenty-Eight are still pure. Maybe just not the Abbotts.” He shot Hannah an uncertain look.

She scoffed and crossed her arms. “Who even cares about that stuff?”

Biting his lip, Vince looked to Harry, who shrugged. “I only checked out this book because it talks about blood gifts. It says that you either have one or not—there’s no in between, like a metamorphmagus who can only change their hair. So if you’re a heliopath, you should be able to do everything heliopaths are supposed to be able to do. You just need practice.”

“My father says it only works with powerful magic,” Vince said.

“Right, that’s what this book says too,” Harry agreed, pointing to the second book he had brought, _Gifts of the Blood,_ which was still askew on the floor. “But it doesn’t have to be you casting the magic—it works on any powerful magic that you get close to, like other people’s spells, or cursed objects. Actually, detecting cursed stuff is what it seems to be most useful for.”

“Really?” Vince asked. Harry blinked at his surprised tone. That application seemed pretty obvious to him.

“What does your father use it for?” he asked.

“He says it’s good for using really powerful spells that are normally hard to control,” Vince said.

“What do you mean, hard to control?” Harry asked, frowning. Wasn’t that the same thing as hard to cast?

“Like curses that could turn on the caster,” Vince said.

“There are spells like that?” Harry asked, appalled. Regular backfiring seemed bad enough, but this sounded even worse. “Why would you want to use them?”

Vince shrugged.

“I’ve never read about that,” Harry mumbled.

“You’re starting to sound like Hermione,” said Neville, exchanging wry smiles with Hannah. Harry frowned, unreasonably annoyed that his friends were making light of this. There was just so much he didn’t know!

“Whatever,” he huffed. “So you’re saying that your father wants you to learn one of those spells then?”

Vince nodded. “That would convince him I’m making progress, I think.”

“Do you have something in mind?” Harry asked.

“Fire spells, cursed fire,” Vince said, and Harry was unwillingly reminded of Luna’s claim about heliopaths secretly being fire spirits.

“No way!” Neville cried, looking pale.

“I know, I’m thick, not mental. I wasn’t going to try that on my own. That stuff could kill you. So that’s why I tried with the blasting curse first, but that didn’t work out,” Vince said.

“The blasting curse is obviously no joke either,” Hannah said, crossing her arms. Neville looked away guiltily, but she didn’t appear to notice, focused on Vince as she was. “I think you’re all looking at this wrong. Vince’s dad wants him to do something completely unrealistic—we should be convincing him that he’s got it wrong, not trying to do it against all common sense.”

Harry, for whom trying to convince adults that they were barmy had never once worked out, scoffed. “And he’s going to listen to a bunch of random twelve-year-olds when he won’t even listen to Vince? What are we going to do, write him a strongly-worded letter?”

“Well what was your idea going to be?” Hannah demanded. “Let me guess, ignore everybody’s warnings because you know better and go try deadly spells?”

Harry grit his teeth, because that was pretty much what he had in mind, but Hannah was still wrong. “You’re basically saying we won’t help because it’s too hard.”

“That’s not what I’m saying. There are ways to convince people,” she said.

“Like the confundus charm?” Harry asked. “Actually that’s not a bad idea, maybe we could learn the confundus charm instead, though it’s supposed to be really difficult.”

“Harry, no!” Hannah yelled, pulling roughly at her hair. “Not everything can be solved with charms!”

“I know that, I’m just saying—”

“Guys, don’t argue, please,” Neville said in a small voice that nevertheless cut through the room. “Let’s just say what we’re thinking, and then Vince can decide.”

Harry and Hannah both froze, glancing awkwardly at Vince. Harry’s chest still felt fit to burst, but now that he noticed how quiet the room suddenly seemed without their heated voices, his anger was quickly giving way to awkwardness.

“Yeah,” he mumbled glancing guiltily to Vince, who looked lost. “Maybe Vince can suggest some ideas too.”

Vince shook his head hurriedly, holding up his hands. “I don’t know. My father told me about the blasting curse, but obviously it wasn’t enough.”

“Wait, your dad made you learn that curse?” Hannah demanded. Harry felt vindicated. Perhaps now she would understand that trying to get Vince’s father to change his mind would be a pointless endeavour. Adults and children just did not see things the same way.

“Yeah,” Vince said, clearly a little intimidated by Hannah’s sudden fury. She opened her mouth but nothing came out.

“I’ve got it,” Harry said. “Write to your dad, like Hannah suggested, and ask him for a different curse. Make it a whole list of them so we can pick the best one.”

Harry figured it was a rather good compromise between their two ideas. Hannah evidently thought otherwise, because she huffed loudly in disapproval. Neville stood hastily.

“How about we find another heliopath to ask for advice? Not your dad, someone else. For a second opinion,” he suggested.

Vince nodded slowly. “We can do all those things, can’t we? I could ask Father for some different spells to try, like you said, Harry.” He turned to Neville. “You can ask your friends if any of them know any heliopaths.”

Neville nodded, smiling in relief.

Vince glanced to Harry and Hannah. “No offence, but you two are half-bloods, so you probably wouldn’t know as many gifted people as Neville. Harry, you like books, so maybe you can look in the library.”

“I’ll look in the library,” Hannah said firmly. “Harry, you should try asking a professor about this. Professor Flitwick, maybe, and I’ll ask Professor Sprout. Actually, we can all ask our heads of house. Well, maybe not Vince. Professor Snape didn’t really seem to approve of what you were doing.”

“That’s putting it lightly,” Neville said, shuddering.

“Great,” said Hannah, clapping her hands. “We have a plan. Now can we please work on the potions essay? I still have four inches to write and I already talked about three different volatile potions.”

“Three? I only gave two examples,” Harry said, unfurling his completed essay on the floor and pinning it down with his elbow.

He compared his composition to Neville’s and Hannah’s, but in the end, decided not to make any changes. Instead, he took out his defence homework—an exposition on how Lockhart had received his Order of Merlin, Third Class, and began to write a conclusion.

Neville stared over gloomily. “How did you get ten inches on that? I tried to look it up but there’s only a short article on it in an old _Daily Prophet._ ”

“Have a look,” Harry said, tossing his mostly complete essay over. “I just made some stuff up about how impressed the committee was with his handling of the Wagga Wagga Werewolf.”

“The essay is literally about Lockhart. You can’t just invent stuff and assume he won’t notice,” Hannah protested.

Lockhart clearly begged to differ—Harry’s liberally embellished story received a glittering blue ‘O’ and pat on the shoulder from the flattered professor, who went as far as to pull him aside after the lesson.

“Excellent work, Mr Potter. Worthy of the front page of the _Prophet_. If I recall correctly, the paper spent far too little time covering my receipt of this distinguished award,” Lockhart said, shaking his head. He smirked conspiratorially and produced an additional piece of parchment. “By the way, here’s the pass that I owe you. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

“Thanks, sir,” Harry said, taking the parchment with bewilderment as Lockhart ushered him out of the classroom.

“Anything for one of my star students,” Lockhart said, swaggering down the hall. Harry glanced down to find a form printed in green ink and signed in blue:

_Access to the Restricted Section of the Hogwart’s Library requested by_ _ Harry Potter _ _for the following book(s) [title and author]:_

_ Deepeste Risinges, by Fleta Peverell _

_Course:_ _ Defence Against the Dark Arts _

_Signed:_ _ Gilderoy Lockhart _

For half a stupefied moment, Harry was stuck wondering why Professor Lockhart would sign him a pass for a book he had never even heard of, let alone requested. Then his wits caught up to him and he remembered who was really controlling the defence professor.

Of course, that realisation offered no further explanation for why the Dark Lord saw it fit to assign him reading. Was it in response to what had happened in the forest with the dementors? Or was he expressing a desire to continue the previous year’s lessons?

What he did know, however, was that it was not good for one’s health to ignore the Dark Lord’s directives, so Harry went straight to the library. Defence had been his last lesson for the day, anyway.

Madam Pince inspected his pass with narrowed eyes and pinched lips, going so far as to produce a monocle and press Lockhart’s signature to her nose, as if looking for a secret message in the flourish of the capital G. At length, she said, “Wait here,” and disappeared into the forbidden stacks behind the rope and placard marking the Restricted Section. A minute later, she returned bearing a dusty tome bound in ancient, brittle leather.

“Thanks,” Harry said. He got a condescending stare for his trouble. Resolutely, he turned around and lugged the heavy book to one of the secluded desks on the other side of the stacks.

As he set it down, he discovered that half its weight had remained behind. His whole body felt like something was dragging it down—not enough to hinder his movement, but undeniably there. He eyed the book with some trepidation, gingerly opening it to the first page.

An inky rendition of a dementor reached out at him, its mouth open in a pitch-black O that expanded and contracted languidly, as if it were taking deep breaths. The text beneath was dense and written in a cramped hand. He licked his lips, frowning at the subtle heaviness that seemed to radiate from the words. No; it wasn’t weight, but a sense of hopelessness, only far milder than that induced by a real dementor. He squinted at the first line.

“Alle the deepeste risinges whiche witches knowe are done beste afore the fouleste of creatures, the dymentor, whiche drinketh the lyf and soule of man and torment him with grete despeir.”

Harry groaned. This book with its archaic spelling was doing a fine job already of tormenting him with great despair. He tried to glean some information from the pages without reading the words, but the dementor-like aura overpowered any other impression he could get. That, or his wizard reading skills still needed work.

As he muddled his way through the introduction, he found himself unwillingly ensnared after all. This book was about conjuration, in the necromancy sense. Harry was almost sure of it. What else could ‘rising soules’ refer to? Then there was the fact that dementors were involved—he remembered that Petri had told him that one of Harry’s predecessors, Horst, had been kissed by a dementor while learning conjuration.

Petri had promised to start teaching him over the winter holiday, if his transfiguration was up to par, but surely it could not hurt to read up on the topic beforehand, especially when it was something the Dark Lord apparently wanted him to know.

Most likely it was the first part of the book that had inspired the Dark Lord to refer Harry to it. The author had rightly assumed that most readers would not have prior experience wrangling dementors, and had written in great detail about where to find them and how to make them cooperate safely. Harry did not have a convenient dungeon lying around with ‘walles drenched in torment and payne’ and ‘filled with sorweful muggeles’ to barter with, so he skipped ahead to the section on using his own soul. Peverell did not recommend this method, but considered it important to know in case one’s supply of disposable muggles ran thin at an inconvenient moment.

Harry thought the next passage must describe what the Dark Lord had done in the forest: “The dymentor is a most curious creature. His wille is to knowen youre thoughtes and dreems, and for this cause he seketh to devouren youre soule. You sholde given him from youre soule withouten the taking of it from you. Offre to him your memorie of childhede and tymes of blis.”

There was even a diagram of a witch pushing back her pointed hat and allowing a dementor to kiss her forehead.

It was important to share happy memories, Peverell explained, because dementors preferred to eat them first. They were uninterested in memories they had already consumed, so by making a copy to give to them, one effectively protected those memories from harm. The spell to copy the memories had to be done beforehand, in a separate location, as the dementor’s presence made it difficult to cast magic.

Harry frowned. The Dark Lord seemed to have managed it just fine even while surrounded by a whole swarm of dementors. Then again, it was the Dark Lord, who seemed to have godlike magical prowess.

Noting that the spell Peverell cited was the same liquid thoughts charm Harry already knew, he figured it would be a good idea to carry some spare happy memories around with him in case he had another run-in with the dementors around the school. They certainly were not going away any time soon. He reached into his pocket, hoping to find a suitable container, and his fingers closed around smooth glass.

He pulled out his hand and saw a vial of blood. Right.

Glancing around to make sure that he was out of sight of Madam Pince’s hawk-like gaze, he uncorked the vial and pressed it to his lips, tossing it back. A frisson of warmth passed through his chest as he swallowed, and he shut his eyes guiltily, savouring the metallic tang that lingered on his tongue. There was definitely something wrong with him, but somehow nobody else seemed to think so, not Petri and not Madam Pomfrey.

“ _Scourgify_ ,” he muttered, casting at the vial before he could give in to the temptation to lick it. Then he pointed his wand to his temple and paused, drawing a blank. What counted as a happy memory?

Nothing from the Dursleys was worth keeping—the dementors could have it all. Petri wasn’t getting any teaching or parenting awards either. Harry thought about flying. Flying was wonderful, but there wasn’t any particular memory that stood out to him. Surely a dementor couldn’t deprive him of the basic understanding of how it felt to fly without actually eating his soul? Uncertain, he pulled a few strands of memory out—his first time on a broom and his race with Draco—and let them dribble into the vial.

Lord Voldemort hadn’t given the dementor happy memories, anyway. As far as Harry recalled, he had just shoved a large portion of both their childhoods at it. How old was the Dark Lord? Harry remembered seeing flashes of some ancient-looking cars, which supported Dumbledore’s claim that Voldemort was a half-blood.

Harry’s growling stomach reminded him that dinner must have already started, so he reluctantly shut the book and took it to the counter to be checked out. Madam Pince informed him brusquely that it was already out under his name, and shooed him out of the library.

Not wanting to be seen with a dark arts book, even one he had obtained perfectly legitimately, Harry trudged all the way to Ravenclaw tower to put it away before heading downstairs. By the time he reached the Great Hall, dinner was halfway over and he had to sit by himself at the end of the table, as there was no room near the other second years. ‘By himself’ was perhaps inaccurate—Luna was also there, absently sipping pumpkin juice with her face buried in a book.

“Hello, Harry,” she greeted without looking up. Harry ladled himself some vegetable soup and paused expectantly, but Luna did not seem interested in further conversation, so he turned his full attention to his meal.

When he finished and stood to leave, however, Luna snapped her book shut and followed him.

“Where are you going, Harry?” she asked.

“Common room,” Harry said. The second week of school had brought with it an onslaught of activity as clubs and societies began to recruit in earnest, and Hannah, who seemed to be involved in every group Hogwarts had to offer, had no time to spare for study sessions. Without her there to organise, Harry and his friends had fallen back to working with their housemates instead.

“How lucky,” said Luna. “That’s where I’m going too.” She hummed a dramatic tune as they climbed the stairs.

“What song is that?” Harry asked.

“The Erlking’s Song,” said Luna. “Do you like it?”

“It’s nice,” he murmured. “Do you mean erkling?”

“No, Erlking,” Luna repeated. “King of the elves.”

An image of Rosenkol reclining on a golden throne and stroking his long beard popped into Harry’s head, and he had to hold back a snort.

“Though erklings are said to be his descendants. They must have mixed up his name. What do you think, Harry? They say when an erkling takes your hand, you cross over into another world,” Luna said. “Doesn’t that sound wonderful?”

“I think they mean, cross over, like you die,” Harry said. He was pretty sure erklings ate children who got lost in forests.

Luna shook her head. “No one knows for sure. There aren’t ever bodies.”

“Because they’re eaten,” Harry suggested.

“Wouldn’t you leave something behind even if you ate someone?” Luna insisted. “All those bones would be tough to chew up.”

Harry did not have a good answer for this. He thought of the string of little bones that Leticia kept around her neck. Luna seemed to take his silence as agreement and began humming the Erlking’s Song again.

“Where do conjured objects come from?” asked the Ravenclaw knocker as they cleared the last steps. Harry furrowed his brows, trying to recall if they had discussed this topic in Transfiguration yet.

“I think they must come out of nonexistence, which is the mirror image of existence,” Luna said after the barest moment of contemplation.

“Insightful,” said the eagle, and the door swung open. Harry’s jaw dropped for a moment. If anything, that answer had been more cryptic than the question!

Luna waved goodbye to him as soon as they entered, disappearing upstairs. Harry looked around the strangely sparse common room for his yearmates and found only Sue and Michael playing a miniature game of gobstones.

“Where is everyone?” he asked, wandering over, though he kept some distance for fear of being sprayed with gobwater. They were using one of the low tables, and had put up a fence of note cards to prevent the marbles from rolling off the edge. Sue shot a red marble right into a green one with a loud click. Michael shoved his arms into his face to shield it from the disgusting blast of liquid.

Still dripping, Michael looked up at Harry and rolled his eyes. “Quidditch,” he said.

A little alarmed, Harry asked, “Tryouts?”

“Saturday,” said Michael. “But they’ve gone to get some practice in, I suppose.”

Harry glanced to the notice board and confirmed the time—Saturday at eight. He would have liked to go flying too, but didn’t fancy walking all the way downstairs again, so instead retreated to the dormitory to finish _Deepeste Risinges_.

The next chapter was finally about ‘rising’ and started right off with some practical instructions.

Step one was to obtain a smooth stone from a riverbed. Harry frowned. He supposed that meant he wasn’t going to be resurrecting the dead any time soon, given the lack of rivers in the vicinity. Perhaps a stone from the lake would do just as well?

Next, the stone had to become saturated with a dementor’s magic. This required about a month’s worth of skin contact with a dementor. Peverell suggested convincing one to wear it like an amulet around its neck, or even to swallow it, though getting it back out could be tricky. With that, one had the basis for a rising stone, which could be used to store a conjured soul for easy recall.

Alas, there were no instructions for how to actually conjure the dead. Peverell assumed that the reader already knew, and the whole rest of the book seemed to be about how to improve the fidelity of an existing conjuration with the aid of a dementor and the rising stone. Harry skimmed it in disappointment, though he was briefly excited when he recognised some of the immaterial conjurations that Petri had asked him to study. He almost took his wand out then and there to give them a try, but was interrupted by the arrival of his loud and sweaty housemates.

“Reckon I still need to work on tightening my turns,” Terry was saying as he stripped off his robes and shoved them into the laundry basket.

“Looked pretty good to me. I still don’t get how you’re supposed to fly with one hand,” Oliver said, shaking his head. “Do you really think I have a chance?”

Terry nodded emphatically before he wandered into the bathroom. “You’ll never know if you don’t try.”

Anthony caught sight of Harry sitting awkwardly on his bed. “Hey Harry, where were you? Didn’t see you at dinner.”

“Library. Lost track of time,” Harry muttered. “You lot went flying?”

Anthony nodded, grinning ruefully. “Terry’s idea, really. He’s set on getting everyone to try out. Doesn’t want the team to be missing out on talent.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “You’d think he was quidditch captain, with that attitude.”

“Actually, I think Stretton put him up to it,” Anthony said. “With Patil and Birch gone, there’s some question of whether we’ll be able to keep our winning streak. Us second years are untapped potential or something.”

“I’m sure he’ll find some good replacements,” Harry said.

“Are you trying out?” Anthony asked.

Harry shrugged. “Maybe.”

Anthony let the topic go in favour of claiming a spot in the shower queue, but Harry wasn’t able to escape scrutiny for long.

“I think you should go for seeker,” Terry told Harry as they walked down to breakfast the next morning. “This is an opportunity you can’t pass up! You’d be a perfect fit. You’re ace at flying, and just look at your build. Fast, light…”

“Scrawny,” Lisa added, smirking as she caught up to them. Harry scowled.

“I don’t know. I haven’t got my own broom, and besides, I don’t know if I’ll have time,” he said.

“Excuses,” Terry muttered, shaking his head. “You can always owl-order a broom after you make it onto the team. And what are you so busy with anyway? We’ve barely got any homework.”

“Yet,” Lisa reminded him.

Terry waved his hand. “Harry can handle it. He’s a clever chap.”

“Don’t you want to be seeker?” Harry asked, privately doubting that Petri would consider a trivial thing like getting on the quidditch team to be adequate justification for spending a fortune on a broomstick. “You’ll have less competition if I don’t go.”

“I just want Ravenclaw to win the cup,” Terry said.

“How selfless,” Lisa drawled. “Maybe you shouldn’t try out either, then.”

“I’m wounded,” said Terry, placing his hand dramatically on his chest. “Have you so little confidence in me?”

“Stretton will probably make Cho seeker, since she was reserve last year,” Harry said unsympathetically as they entered the great hall. He glanced briefly at Cho, who was sitting with Marietta as usual, and then looked away quickly in favour of finding an empty spot.

Just as Harry had helped himself to some porridge and was about to take a bite, an owl swooped down and dropped a note in front of him. He snatched it out of the air before it could land in his bowl and unfurled it curiously, finding familiar, slanting handwriting. It was a note from Professor Dumbledore, informing him that his first private lesson would take place this Saturday at eight. He felt a simultaneous surge of disappointment and relief.

“What is it?” Terry asked, trying to read the note over his shoulder. Harry let it go and it sprang back into a tight roll.

“I’ve got to see Dumbledore on Saturday at eight. That’s during quidditch trials, so I suppose I can’t go anyway,” he said.

“What? Let me see that,” Terry muttered, snatching up the parchment before Harry could stop him. “Private lessons, are you serious?”

“You’ve got private lessons with the headmaster?” Lisa demanded. “How did you manage that?”

Harry shrugged. “I’m not sure. He just sort of offered.”

“What is he teaching you? Alchemy?” Lisa leaned forward, her eyes wide. Harry shrugged again.

“I’m not sure about that, either. He didn’t say,” he said.

“The headmaster randomly offered to give you lessons on an unknown topic. That’s completely mad! You have to tell us all about it later,” Lisa demanded.

Harry nodded helplessly.

“That’s too bad, mate,” Terry said, clapping him on the shoulder. “I hope whatever it is is worth missing out on seeker for.”

Given that he probably wouldn’t have made seeker anyway without his own broom, Harry thought that learning literally anything from Dumbledore would be time better spent than having his hopes crushed by bludgers.

Dumbledore’s office was on the seventh floor, not too far from the transforming room of rubbish, and apparently located behind an extremely ugly gargoyle. On the appointed day, Harry approached it with some trepidation, but it did not so much as twitch in reaction to his presence.

“Ice mice,” Harry told it, following the instructions that had been included in the note. The gargoyle leapt to the side with alacrity, sending Harry stumbling back as the wall behind it split open and revealed a stone staircase. Hurriedly, he ascended the steps, only to find that they ended just around the bend. With a rumble, the short staircase began to spiral upwards on its own, like a lift, until it slotted into place at the very top of the tower.

Disorientated, Harry stepped off and knocked on the polished wooden door in front of him. It opened by itself almost at once. He entered slowly, looking around the bright, airy room in wonder. The walls were covered with portraits of distinguished-looking men and women, many of whom glanced to him in undisguised curiosity. Below them, on little tables, a variety of silvery instruments puffed and whirred. He vaguely recognised the shape of one or two of them from Petri’s shop, but their function eluded him.

Professor Dumbledore smiled genially at him from behind an enormous desk. As Harry turned to shut the door behind him, he caught sight of a magnificent, fiery bird on a golden perch, dozing with its head tucked under its wing. Forgetting himself for a moment, Harry stared open-mouthed.

“Ah yes,” said Professor Dumbledore, and Harry whipped around hastily. “Don’t mind Fawkes. He’s quite the heavy sleeper. Please, have a seat.”

There were two comfortable-looking chairs situated in front of Dumbledore’s desk. One of them slid backwards a few feet at these words. Harry sat down gingerly, glancing back one more time.

“What sort of bird is he?” Harry asked, though he suspected he knew the answer.

“Fawkes is a phoenix. They’re marvellous birds—they can carry surprisingly heavy loads, their tears have healing properties, and they make very faithful pets,” Dumbledore explained. “I am fortunate to have him as my companion. Now, am I correct that you have been wondering what exactly I have planned for these lessons?”

Harry nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Dumbledore’s hands came together to rest on the desk. “It is perhaps erroneous to call them lessons at all. More accurately, I hope they will be a fruitful exchange of information. Now that you know what prompted Lord Voldemort to attack you eleven years ago and continues to drive his interest in you today, I have decided that we should embark together on a journey of investigation. The facts begin with that fateful night in Godric’s Hollow and end with Lord Voldemort’s successful use of the philosopher’s stone to resurrect himself. In between lie the murky waters of speculation, into which I plan for us to dive headfirst.”

“You mean, sir, how he survived the backfired killing curse, and what he was doing up until he possessed Professor Quirrell?” Harry asked.

Dumbledore nodded. “Among other things. Before we begin, however, I have some questions for you. Please answer honestly—I promise that you will not be worse off for it, whatever the case may be.”

He paused, so Harry said, “Of course, sir,” burning with curiosity and some trepidation.

“Very well. First—you mentioned that you were placed under the imperius curse. At that time, did you see Lord Voldemort in person, in his own body?” Dumbledore asked.

That was an easy question. Harry nodded. “Yes, sir, I did.”

“And you were able to see his face?” Dumbledore added.

“Yes, sir,” Harry confirmed, uncertain as to where this line of questioning was leading.

Dumbledore hummed. “Did he leave you with the means to contact him?”

Harry looked up and met Dumbledore’s eyes for the first time. They peered at him earnestly from behind half-moon spectacles, a cool and serene blue. Though the question might have been alarming in principle, he sensed no threat in the air. It was nothing like the piercing judgment of the Dark Lord’s crimson gaze.

“Not directly, sir,” Harry said. “I think I could get a hold of him, though, if I had to.”

He maintained eye-contact and did his best to relax and not think too much. Strangely enough, it was easy to keep his mind clear in Professor Dumbledore’s presence. There was no sign of legilimency.

“Thank you, Harry,” said Dumbledore, closing his eyes for a moment. “Please understand that I do not wish to place the burden of secrecy on your shoulders. The information that we learn here is yours to do with as you like, though naturally, I advise you to practise some discretion.”

Was Dumbledore basically giving him blanket permission to tell the Dark Lord everything, if pressed? Harry felt some tension that he had not even been aware of leave his shoulders. “Thank you, sir,” he said, though he still had no intention of letting slip more than he needed to Lord Voldemort.

Dumbledore smiled sadly. “It would be terribly unfair of me to demand otherwise, especially as I shall be relying on your help. As you have correctly supposed, our aim is to learn what exactly happened to Voldemort after his failed attempt on your life. More precisely, we should hope to discover the mechanism of his survival and the means of disabling it.”

“Sir, you want to find out how to kill him?” Harry demanded, sitting up straighter. “Permanently?”

“It is my wish that you should be equipped to face your fate on an even playing field,” Dumbledore said, which Harry took to be a more elegant confirmation of his assumption. He nodded.

“That makes sense,” he said. “But, pardon me for asking, sir, if even you don’t know how he managed to survive, how am I supposed to help? You must know so much more than I do about magic that could do that sort of thing.”

“I do, indeed, have one or two theories in mind,” Dumbledore agreed. “Theories, however, are worth little without evidence, and I find myself sorely lacking evidence one way or another. Forgive me for asking this of you, but you have seen Voldemort both before and after his resurrection. I would like you to add your testimony to my collection of facts, then, so that my guesswork might move closer to the truth.”

He stood and turned to a cabinet behind him, extracting a shallow stone basin which he set carefully on his desk.

“Are you familiar with this object, Harry?” Dumbledore asked.

Harry nodded. “It’s a pensieve.” It was larger and more elaborately decorated than Petri’s, but still recognisable. “Do you want me to show you some memories?”

Dumbledore beamed. “Actually, I was hoping to share one of mine.”

He produced a small glass jar and uncorked it with a flick of his wand, tipping its silvery contents into the basin, where they pooled and began to exude an ethereal mist. Harry wondered briefly why Dumbledore stored memories outside his head, but then remembered that he was now guilty of the same practice.

“Shall we enter together?” Dumbledore asked, holding out a weathered hand. Harry took it cautiously and bent forward in tandem with him until their noses touched the liquid memory. Then silver mist overtook his senses, and they were falling, their hands still firmly clasped.

The ground materialised under their feet, and Harry looked around rapidly, trying to orient himself. They had appeared at the front of a terraced auditorium with red brick walls, harshly lit by rows of gas lamps. Though the seats were filled with witches and wizards, it was silent in the hall except for the whirring of silver instruments on stage—the same ones from Dumbledore’s office, it seemed. They were arranged on a curved stone table in front of which were two steaming gold cauldrons, one small and one enormous, which an elderly man with scraggly curls was stirring simultaneously with great concentration. Across from him stood an auburn-haired man—Dumbledore, Harry assumed, though without the flowing beard and colourful wardrobe, one had to look to the crooked nose to see the resemblance.

Harry took a closer look at the old man. There was something familiar about him, too. Just then, the man glanced up, and Harry gasped.

“Is that Nicolas Flamel?” he asked. But he looked so ancient—the Nic Harry had met had seemed at least several decades younger.

Dumbledore, the real one, hummed. “Indeed it is,” he said. “How did you know?”

“We met once,” Harry said a little hesitantly. “Is he… I heard he…”

“Yes, he has indeed gone on to his next great adventure,” Dumbledore confirmed. Harry glanced at his calm face, a little bemused. He made death sound so pleasant. “Right now, I would like to draw your attention to the back row.”

Harry turned to the audience, his gaze meandering up the centre aisle. The majority of attendees were ancient and wrinkled, but there, at the top, one could find a line of fresh, smooth faces. A blond wizard in particular stood out—Harry almost thought he was looking at Lucius Malfoy, only this man was stockier and wore a more pleasant expression. They had to be related somehow.

“Do you see anybody you recognise?” Dumbledore asked. Harry scanned over the other faces quickly, but found little to go on.

“Not exactly. That man looks a lot like Lucius Malfoy, though,” he said.

Dumbledore hummed. “Yes. That would be Abraxas Malfoy, his father. The man to Mr Malfoy’s left—is he in any way familiar to you?”

Harry studied the indicated figure. He was pale, even paler than Abraxas Malfoy beside him, something that was only accentuated by his dark hair, which had been parted and combed back with severe precision. Unlike his neighbours, who sat passively as if they were watching some plebeian spectacle, this man was leaning forward in rapt attention, his eyes fixed unerringly on Dumbledore—the one on the stage who was puttering about, moving instruments here and there. That was all Harry could glean from observing him.

“No, I’ve never seen him,” he said, wondering what he was missing.

“Interesting,” Dumbledore said. “That is Tom Riddle, though I am sure he had already begun going by his new name at this point in time. I presume the Voldemort you encountered had a very different appearance, then?”

Harry stared at the alleged young Dark Lord for a few more bewildered moments, trying in vain to find some trace of that waxy, mask-like visage in his handsome features. He shook his head. “He looks really different. His eyes are all red now, he’s bald, and he doesn’t really have a nose. And he’s very thin, like he hasn’t eaten in ages, but he’s still strong. Physically, I mean.”

“From your description, it seems to me he is as he was immediately before his death—or rather, incapacitation. Most curious,” Dumbledore said.

Harry glanced up to him in confusion. “Why is that curious, sir? Doesn’t it make sense that he would look the same as before?”

In lieu of answering, Dumbledore gestured up towards the stage, where his counterpart had picked up his wand. Harry wasn’t sure, but he thought it looked different than Dumbledore’s current wand, darker and smoother. Young Dumbledore pressed it to his throat and suddenly his voice resounded through the auditorium.

“Distinguished witches and wizards, I apologise most deeply for the delay. There was a bit of a mix-up earlier with some international portkeys, I’m afraid, but we are now present and finished with our preparations. Today, I am fortunate to assist renowned alchemist Nicolas Flamel in the demonstration of a ground-breaking experimental result. No doubt many of you have already read all about the acceleration of the homunculus in _Transfiguration Today_ or _Sorcery_ , so I shall spare you the arcane details… those who are curious or wish to refresh their memories can find a copy of the article on the back of the seat in front of you.”

There was a rustle across the auditorium, and Dumbledore chuckled.

“I believe, however, that you will find what we have to show you much more interesting than a few dry charts and equations. May I direct your attention to cauldron B?” Dumbledore twirled his wand in a complicated motion, and the larger cauldron turned transparent.

Harry gasped as he saw what was inside—it was a baby! What else could it be, with its oversized, bald head and curled little limbs, suspended in bubbly red fluid? He glanced questioningly up at the real Dumbledore, who looked perfectly unfazed. Well, it was his memory, Harry supposed.

“Préparez-vous,” murmured Nicolas Flamel, tapping one of the silver instruments with his wand. It shuddered and spat out a particularly thick glob of red smoke. He tapped several others in quick succession and they chimed in a concordant scale, spewing smoke in all colours of the rainbow.

Dumbledore nodded. To the audience, he announced, “Observe the perfect harmony of the seven vapours. This is the indication that the white stone is ready.”

Flamel set down his wand and picked up the small cauldron by hand, tipping its contents into the cauldron with the baby. For a second, nothing happened, but then a large lump tumbled out and landed in the red liquid with a splash, glowing radiantly as it sank to the bottom of the cauldron and left a trail of bubbles in its wake. At once, Dumbledore began casting silently, thick brows furrowed in serious concentration. Clear steam rose from the cauldron, drifting and billowing about the room in great swathes. By the by, from within the mist, a shadow coalesced, and Harry gasped along with the rest of the audience as he made out a blurry head and shoulders. Somebody was coming out of the cauldron!

Flamel shouted something unintelligible as he joined in with his own spell. Eerie red light enveloped the burgeoning form, streaming from half-formed orifices. The steam turned darker, and the silver instruments, nothing more than the faintest silhouettes, spun and clinked with ever fiercer intensity, stuttering out a haunting melody.

The steam settled, and a final chime rang out, high-pitched and unpleasant. A body hung suspended by the force of two wands, fully formed and naked. Harry flushed and looked up at the man’s face. His jaw dropped. It was the Nic Harry had known, with sleek blond hair and unblemished skin. Though his eyes were open, his expression was utterly vacant—Harry could not help thinking that he was unconscious.

“Bravo!” said the old Flamel, beaming at Dumbledore. He turned to the audience, which was applauding heartily. “As you can see, he lives and breathes. He can even walk.”

They lowered the apparent clone of Flamel and he took a few mechanical steps. Though the rise and fall of his chest was evident, there was something disturbingly doll-like about him that sent a shudder down Harry’s spine. Even an inferius had more life to it.

The room decohered into a soup of colour, which bled away to silver and finally black as the memory ended. Harry blinked rapidly as they resurfaced from the pensieve, rubbing at his temples.

“Sir, what was that?” he blurted, full of questions he wasn’t even sure how to articulate.

“That was the transmutation of a homunculus, an artificial human, if you will, using the philosopher’s stone. It is what we logically must assume that Lord Voldemort has done in order to procure himself a body,” Professor Dumbledore explained.

Harry had almost forgotten that their meeting was about Voldemort, completely distracted by what he had just witnessed. Still, the dead look in homunculus Nic’s eyes haunted him. He chanced an academic question. “Since magic can’t make will, does that mean the homunculus doesn’t have a soul?”

Dumbledore seemed to do a double-take. Harry looked down, a little intimidated by the sudden intensity of his gaze.

“That is an extremely insightful question, Harry. Alas, the answer is not simple. We know that at the moment of its creation, the homunculus, like a newborn child, has no soul. However, we cannot decisively prove that it would be unable to develop one, just as any ordinary baby would over the course of its first year.”

“Babies don’t have souls?” Harry demanded. A faint smile tugged at the edges of Dumbledore’s lips.

“Forgive me, I’m afraid I was momentarily lost in the technicalities. I should have said that their souls are immature, and have yet to take shape,” he said.

Harry frowned. “But which one is it? If a homunculus is supposed to be like a baby, then you’re saying, sir, that actually, they _do_ have souls?”

“Nothing escapes you, I see,” said Dumbledore, though he looked pleased. “I have been remiss in not starting from the beginning. So—let us rectify that error—can you define for me, Harry, what a soul is?”

Suddenly nervous, Harry thought anxiously back to Petri’s disparaging rants about his least-favourite word. “A soul is who you are? Your identity?” Even as he said it, he knew it was not quite right—he knew that a faulty memory charm could destroy one’s identity without harming the soul.

“Close. It is one step further back from that,” said Dumbledore.

Harry stared at him in bemusement. “As in, something that holds your identity?” he asked.

Dumbledore took pity on him. “Do not make the mistake of thinking of the soul as a mysterious, intangible object. We are concerned with something much more commonplace. The soul is simply one’s grasp of one’s identity. The understanding of the difference between self and other.”

He paused there. Harry nodded. “I see, sir.”

“I hope I am correct in assuming that you have no recollection of being an infant?” Dumbledore asked.

Harry nodded.

“As far as we know, nobody old enough to speak of it has ever had such a recollection, at least, not one which could be replicated in a pensieve, nor can anybody realistically claim to understand what it is like to be an infant. This fact does not, of course, demonstrate that infants do not have souls, only that whatever they may possess is distinct from our souls as we know them. So you see, for practical purposes, whether they have a nascent soul or no soul at all is largely irrelevant,” Dumbledore said.

“Okay. Well, what do you think, sir?” Harry asked. “If you just waited, would a homunculus grow a regular soul? Has anybody tried?”

“I can tell you that simply waiting will produce no results, as a pervasive problem with homunculi is their propensity to die, inexplicably, within weeks of their creation without continuous maintenance. I suspect, though I cannot confirm, that there is a critical time shortly after birth during which the seeds of a healthy soul must be planted and nurtured. For a fully grown homunculus, that time would be long past, but if one were to create an infant homunculus and successfully raise it as a child, perhaps it would be indistinguishable from a human. Neither Nicolas nor I have ever gone down that avenue of experimentation.”

Harry wanted to ask why, but he sensed some weight behind the pleasant smile with which Dumbledore had ended his answer, and felt that it might be impolite to press on. They lingered in silence for a few moments.

“Now, I believe we have veered quite far from our original topic,” Dumbledore said.

“Sorry, sir,” Harry mumbled, reddening slightly.

“Do not apologise, Harry. Curiosity is a wonderful thing, and to indulge it, the purest expression of our nature,” said Dumbledore. “In any case, I wished for you to view that memory so that you could best understand what I suspect Voldemort has done to regain his body. I find that seeing something with one’s own eyes is often superior to any explanation, however detailed.”

“I think so too, sir,” Harry agreed. “But I don’t understand why Voldemort needed to make a homunculus in the first place. You can reanimate bodies—I mean, I’m sure Voldemort can reanimate bodies, so why didn’t he just use some inferius?”

“Certainly, creating a homunculus is not the only way of procuring a functional body. The difficulty for Voldemort lay in obtaining a body that his soul could inhabit for any length of time. You will agree, I hope, that your sense of identity includes something about your physical attributes?” Dumbledore asked.

Harry nodded.

“For that reason, occupying the wrong body puts a terrible strain on both the soul and the body. As I believe you know, Professor Quirrell was only able to tolerate Voldemort’s possession for so long by drinking unicorn blood regularly to prolong his life.”

Harry frowned. He had been so sure that his anonymous tip last year had been, well, anonymous. “So the homunculus would have been similar enough to Voldemort’s original body that he could live in it without problems? I did notice that the homunculus you made looked a lot like Flamel.”

“Here is where I am hoping for your help, Harry,” Dumbledore said. “As far as I know, and I do not believe it is arrogance to say that that is as far as anybody knows, there is no body other than one’s original body which can naturally house one’s functioning soul. A homunculus comes close, but is insufficient. This is the reason why Voldemort needed the philosopher’s stone, and why, for that matter, Nicolas needed it. In order to keep his soul and body in harmony, he required a monthly dose of an elixir freshly brewed using the stone. The recipe for this elixir was known to two people alone—Nicolas Flamel and his wife, Perenelle. Even I have never been privy to the secret.”

Harry felt his heart sinking rapidly.

Dumbledore continued, “You understand, then, that news of Lord Voldemort’s resurrection and continued good health came as somewhat of a shock to me.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Harry blurted, “It’s my fault. I gave him a book that Nicolas Flamel gave me. I mean, I lent it to Professor Quirrell, before I knew…”

Dumbledore held up a hand to stop him. He did not look at all angry, merely curious. “Would this book happen to be titled, _Secrets of the Hieroglyphical Figures_?”

Harry nodded dumbly. Dumbledore waved his wand and a book zoomed off a shelf into his outstretched hand. Harry glanced down and confirmed his suspicion that it was another copy of the book in question.

“Rest assured, Harry, that I am quite familiar with this book, so I can confidently say that there is no mention at all of instructions to brew the elixir of life. It does, however, explain how to safely handle the philosopher’s stone. I admit, considering that this book went out of print before Tom Riddle was even born, that I had some hope of hoodwinking him into misusing the stone and destroying himself, but it was a slim hope at best.” Dumbledore smiled kindly. “Do not trouble yourself with thoughts of what might have been, and instead let us focus on what is.”

Harry nodded, a little abashed. “Thanks, sir. Sorry for jumping to conclusions. So Voldemort couldn’t have found out from anybody how to make this elixir. But couldn’t he have figured it out himself?”

“I do not wish to underestimate Lord Voldemort, but the likelihood of his having engineered the recipe in the span of a month without even a sample to work from is low. It took Nicolas the better part of his life to create it, and he was perhaps one of the greatest alchemists to have ever lived,” Dumbledore said.

Harry wasn’t so sure. He distinctly remembered Voldemort handling a red potion in his vision, one very similar to the one in Dumbledore’s memory in which the homunculus had been suspended. Unless…“The potion to make the homunculus, that’s not the elixir of life?”

Dumbledore looked surprised at this line of questioning. He shook his head. “No, it is not. The red water is simply created by dissolving the stone in water. It acts as a catalyst for transmutation when mixed with other substances.”

“I saw Voldemort with that red water,” Harry said by way of explanation. “But I suppose that doesn’t mean anything then. If he doesn’t have the elixir, maybe he found another way? Could he be drinking unicorn blood still?”

“While Voldemort was perfectly content to leave the heavy consequences of drinking unicorn blood to his servant, I very much doubt that he would be willing to accept those consequences onto himself. No, he is using some other method, something I hope you can aid me in discovering,” Dumbledore said. “I believe his appearance will give us some hints. I found it strange that Voldemort should not more resemble his younger self. Do you now understand why?”

Harry thought for a moment, then nodded. “If he grew himself a body from a baby, then it doesn’t make sense that he would want it old or deformed.”

“The only ready explanation that I have for why Voldemort chose to retain such features over those he was born with is that they are a fundamental part of his identity. At a minimum, he considers them strengths rather than infirmities,” Dumbledore said after a moment of contemplation.

“Is he wrong, sir?” Harry asked. It was clear that the man had once been very handsome. For Voldemort to have given that up, he must have had a compelling reason.

“Voldemort has always been attracted to certain kinds of power, the sort to be found in pursuing the extraordinary to its extremes. Naturally, I disagree with his outlook. There is much to be gained in living life alongside others rather than apart from them,” Dumbledore said.

“You mean, having friends, sir?” Harry asked.

Dumbledore nodded. “Precisely, Harry. The love we have for our friends and family is a power that transcends any other magic. This is something that Voldemort has never understood.”

“I’m not sure I understand either, sir,” Harry confessed. “Do you mean that having friends who can help you is better than just being magically powerful?”

“On the contrary Harry, I mean entirely literally that the most powerful magic there is is magic cast with love. That you are sitting here before me today is a testament to that claim,” Dumbledore said.

“Because my mum died for me,” Harry said, feeling a painful tightening in his chest. “But sir, there are people who would die for Voldemort. Even though he’s an awful person, there are people who love him. Some of his followers.”

What else could the source of Barty’s fervent devotion be? Harry had seen it before only in Rosenkol’s eyes when he looked at Petri—the purest joy in another’s presence.

“You may very well be correct,” said Professor Dumbledore with a grave mien, “and they are ever more formidable for it. Lord Voldemort himself, however, has always been dismissive of this type of magic, and I am confident that his means of survival lie elsewhere. For his methods to have warped him physically, not as an unwanted side-effect but intentionally, suggests that he has tampered extensively with his soul.”

“Like a horcrux,” Harry said, before he could think. The twinkle disappeared from Dumbledore’s eye and the lines in his face deepened.

“I suppose Joachim has mentioned horcruxes to you?” he asked severely.

Harry nodded with haste, relieved to shunt the headmaster’s disapproval onto Petri.

“There are some pieces of knowledge so vile and dangerous that I wish they could be lost forever, and knowledge of the horcrux is one of them.” Dumbledore sighed. “Alas, it is our duty to arm ourselves with the same information as our opponents, and you would be correct to assume that Voldemort is more than capable of having created one. Even a horcrux, however, does not adequately explain the facts as they are. Do you see why?”

Harry was about to protest that he didn’t actually know that much about horcruxes, only that they were basically a copy of a person, before the answer came to him: “He’s the original Voldemort.”

“Exactly,” said Dumbledore. “I thought as much when you mentioned that he told you coming after you had been a mistake. And the ease with which he was able to leap from possessing you to Professor Quirrell suggests that he was not dependent on a cursed object, as a horcrux would have been. We can only conclude that Voldemort truly survived his failed attempt on your life—bodiless, weakened, but not dead. And whatever his means of survival was then, it may be the same mechanism he is using now to bind himself to his new body.”

“But you don’t know how he’s doing it, sir?” Harry asked.

“I do not,” Dumbledore confirmed, pressing his fingertips together. “But I believe the answer lies buried in his past. There is a period of ten years during which Voldemort’s whereabouts are completely unaccounted for. At the end of it he resurfaced to apply for a teaching position at Hogwarts, which I refused him, and not long after he began to wreak systematic havoc on Great Britain. From then on there can be a reliable record of his movements. I do not think he would have shown himself so publicly, had he not believed his immortality to be secure. We must therefore uncover where he was and what he was doing during those quiet years.”

At first, this sounded like an impossible task to Harry, but then he remembered that even he knew something of finding out information about somebody’s whereabouts in the past. “Through divination, sir? Scrying?” he asked.

“That is indeed one possible avenue,” Dumbledore agreed. “If you are interested, perhaps you could work with our divination professor, Professor Trelawney. With your fate and Voldemort’s so closely entwined, you may be in a unique position to see clearly into his past. We can compare notes in a few weeks’ time.”

“What are you planning on doing, sir?” Harry asked.

Dumbledore smiled reassuringly. “When one gets as old as I am, one finds that one has acquaintances in every corner of the world, if one only cares to look.”

Harry remembered, then, that Dumbledore was the leader of the International Confederation of Wizards.

“You think Voldemort was out of the country, then, sir?” Harry asked.

“Oh, most assuredly,” said Dumbledore. “Since its establishment, the Ministry of Magic has always placed tight restrictions on research into altering souls. All meaningful progress on that subject in the past few centuries has been made abroad.”

Harry frowned. “Why? Is it really that dangerous?” He could not help thinking guiltily to what he had done to Silviu without even meaning to. Yes, perhaps it was precisely that dangerous.

“It is extremely dangerous, certainly, but that is not the reason for its prohibition. There are a great number of dangerous magics that we can and do practise for the sake of intellectual advancement. The difference here is that the very act of experimentation on the soul is itself repugnant in the eyes of many,” Professor Dumbledore explained.

Harry considered his words carefully. There had been a measure of ambiguity in that response. “Do you agree with that, sir?”

Dumbledore gave him a considering look before he spoke. “I believe that much good can come of understanding the soul, but nonetheless, yes, I agree that any experimentation involving direct alteration cannot be ethically undertaken.”

“I see, sir,” Harry said, staring down at the grain of the polished wooden desk. The bright reflection of the lamps was almost blinding, and he realised suddenly how dark it had got outside and how deathly silent the office seemed.

“I believe that is all for tonight. I have been remiss in keeping you so late,” Dumbledore said after a moment. He removed a sheet of parchment from one of his desk drawers and wrote a short note, passing it to Harry, who took it numbly. It was a pass for being out past curfew. Had it really been that long already?

“Thank you, sir,” Harry said, getting to his feet.

“I will let Professor Trelawney know to expect you in the coming weeks,” Dumbledore said.

Harry nodded. “Where is her office, sir? Does she have office hours?”

“Professor Trelawney resides in the topmost chamber of the North Tower. You will find her there almost all hours of the day, and I am sure she will be pleased to see you whenever there are no Divination lessons in progress,” Dumbledore told him.

Harry thanked him and took his leave, eyes lingering on the phoenix’s slumbering form as he passed into the stairwell. There was an unsettling feeling in his chest, like someone had pinched his heart and was tugging it downwards. It persisted until the stone staircase settled onto the bottom of the tower with a rumble and spat him back out in front of the gargoyle.

Shivering in the drafty corridor, he made his way hurriedly back to Ravenclaw Tower, feeling distinctly exposed, as if he were doing something illicit. He clutched the note in his hand more tightly, glancing around every corner with nervousness, with the result that he nearly jumped out of his skin when a pearly-white ghost drifted into the next intersection at speed.

“Oh, pardon me, young man,” said the ghost, stopping in place with unnatural abruptness. His head promptly flopped off his shoulders, exposing a flash of silvery gore. It was the Gryffindor house ghost, Nearly-Headless Nick.

“Sorry, sir,” Harry said, not sure what was he was apologising for. “I’ve got a pass.” He held up his slip of paper.

Nick popped his head back into place and stared at him in incomprehension. Harry reflected that perhaps the daily passage of time seemed much less relevant when one was a ghost.

“Never mind,” he mumbled, making to go around.

“Wait!” said the ghost. “Are you coming from the headmaster’s office?”

Harry nodded.

“Is he still there, then? I was hoping to catch him for a chat, but he’s been awfully busy lately.”

“He’s probably still there,” Harry said.

Nick drew himself up with sudden alertness. “Excellent. Thank you very much, young man. What is your name, by the way?”

“Harry.”

“Sir Nicholas de Mimsy Porpington, at your service,” said Nick with a graceful bow that led his head to teeter precariously. “Now, I must make haste, but I am certain we shall meet again, young Harry.”

Harry stared after his swiftly floating form for a moment in bemusement before he hurried on his way.

He found Lisa and Anthony playing exploding snap in the common room when he arrived. Lisa dropped all her cards immediately, blowing up the whole deck in the middle of the table, and sprang out of her seat to meet him.

“Well, what did Professor Dumbledore teach you?” she demanded. Behind her, Anthony gave the ruined game a long-suffering look and slowly shuffled over to join her.

Harry frowned, feeling suddenly awkward. What was he supposed to say? The matter of discovering Lord Voldemort’s secrets was, well, rather private.

“It turned out to be something personal,” he said truthfully. “Not advanced magic or anything. He… wanted to share some things about my parents. Since I’ve never met them.”

This lie sounded lame once he voiced it, but Lisa’s mouth formed an ‘O’ and she nodded.

“Right,” she mumbled, smiling sympathetically, “I suppose that makes sense.”

Harry glanced around, half expecting Terry to jump out and bemoan his missing Quidditch trials, but the boy was nowhere to be found.

“Where’s Terry?” Harry asked.

Lisa promptly rolled her eyes. “Sulking in his bed.”

Harry snorted. “Who’s on the team then?”

“Jason—third year Jason, I mean, is beater, and Cho is seeker,” Anthony reported.

Harry wasn’t surprised at all by this outcome. Still, he went upstairs and dutifully listened to Terry’s play by play of how he had failed to see the snitch anywhere, on account of it being too dark.

“Quidditch games aren’t ever at night, so it’s unrealistic,” Terry complained, swinging his legs against his wooden bed frame. Harry smiled and nodded, not all there. He couldn’t stop thinking about the things that Dumbledore had said about Lord Voldemort and about magic.

He understood well enough why it was wrong to mess with somebody else’s soul. What he had done to Silviu—it hadn’t hurt him, exactly, but the results had gnawed at Harry in a visceral way nonetheless. But what was wrong with changing one’s own soul? It sounded like a bad idea, in the sense that there were many obvious ways to cause permanent damage, but that wasn’t what Dumbledore had said. He had said that it was not ethical. Harry turned it around a few times in his head but could not make heads or tails of the reason why.

And then there was the matter of love and friendship. That had been frustratingly vague and a little ‘wishy-washy,’ as Neville’s gran might put it. Still, Dumbledore was apparently one of the most powerful wizards ever, and Petri was definitely afraid of him. Harry couldn’t just discount his claims about magic because he had a hard time understanding them.

Perhaps he could ask more about it next time. After all, if love really was powerful, beyond self-sacrifice, and something Lord Voldemort didn’t know about, then it might be useful for him to study it, if only to gain some small advantage.

“And then I saw it by one of the goal posts—I swear I saw it first, but Cho just appeared out of nowhere and cut me off—are you listening to me?” Terry demanded.

Harry, who realised that his face was screwed up in concentration, relaxed his mouth and nodded. He held up his hands and mimed Terry’s flight trajectory, slamming the fingers of his left hand into his right palm.

“We didn’t crash,” Terry protested, and Harry dutifully repeated the motion, swerving at the last moment.

“Classic trick,” Harry said, grinning as he thought over the story. “I reckon she hadn’t even seen the snitch, just noticed you changing direction and went to stall you.”

Terry sighed deeply. “This is why I wanted _you_ to try out. How was Dumbledore’s private lesson?”

Harry repeated the same thing he had told Lisa. Rather than reacting dismissively as he had half expected, Terry gave him an awkward grimace.

“Oh. That’s really thoughtful of him,” he said. “Hey, our parents were probably around the same age, right? Maybe I can write my mum and see if she knew them at all.”

A strange warmth pooled in Harry’s chest. The dim, featureless forms of his parents, indescribable and yet crystal-clear as they had been in that golden mirror, swam into his mind’s eye. “That would be really nice, thanks.”

“No problem,” said Terry. His mouth remained open, as if he wanted to continue, but finally he pivoted to slump into his mattress without saying anything else. Harry lay back on his own bed, closing his eyes.

If he learned to conjure spirits, he might really be able to brings his parents back. Not permanently, not with only what he could learn from Petri and from books, but even an ephemeral conjuration was something. He could see them, speak to them.

Still, a seed of worry crept into his heart. Would they approve of him? They had loved him—that he lived while they had died was incontrovertible evidence of it. But would they still love him as he was today?


	47. Pathfinder

One dreary October morning, an owl dropped a somewhat yellowed newspaper onto Terry’s head in addition to his usual correspondence from his parents.

“Ow,” he muttered, unfurling the paper and blinking at it in bemusement. “Hogwarts’ Herald? Since when did we have a school paper? Nineteen seventy-six. Blimey, this is ancient!”

Harry glanced over Terry’s shoulder. A black-and-white photograph dominated the page, showing a nervous keeper hovering in front of the quidditch hoops. Two chasers darted into the shot, tossing the quaffle in the air—a feint! A third chaser came from overhead and used the tail of his broom to launch the quaffle straight into the unguarded right hoop. Then, to Harry’s shock, he pulled his broom up and held out his hand, proudly displaying the golden snitch trapped between his fingers.

“Did that chaser just catch the snitch?” Harry demanded.

“Is that legal?” Anthony asked, leaning over to look as the photograph looped back to the beginning of the scene.

“No, I think it’s a foul,” Terry muttered. “Why’d my parents send me this?”

Terry dropped the paper in favour of his letter, and Harry finally saw the headline underneath the photo: “POTTER CATCHES SNITCH—Sunday’s quidditch match between Gryffindor and Slytherin ended in a surprise upset as Gryffindor Chaser James Potter caught the snitch immediately after scoring with the quaffle. Slytherin Captain Alcott Wilkes cried foul—snitchnipping normally disqualifies the offending team—but that was when Captain Potter revealed that he had substituted for injured Seeker Melisma Macmillan that game, leaving his chaser position officially unoccupied. ‘There’s no rule against the seeker touching the quaffle’, Potter told the Herald… (continued on page 4)’

James Potter—that had to be his father. So his dad had played quidditch for Gryffindor?

“Oh, I suppose this is for you,” Terry said, pushing the paper to Harry. “My mum sent it. I asked her about your parents. She says she didn’t know your dad personally, but he was a bit of a celebrity at school, and she had to take a lot of photos of him for the paper. Apparently Professor Flitwick used to run it, so he might have saved some back issues.”

“I wonder why we haven’t got a paper any more,” said Anthony. “I would’ve liked to give journalism a try.”

“It’s all gossip-mongering,” Terry said dismissively.

“Didn’t you just say your mum took photos for it?” Anthony demanded.

“Yeah, photos, not writing,” Terry said.

Harry grinned. “Thanks Terry. I’ll ask Professor Flitwick.”

The list of things he needed to ask Professor Flitwick about had grown long indeed, so Harry finally made a determined effort to get into his office hours. Earlier in the year, there had been NEWT students clustered outside the professor’s door every day,  bemoaning the difficulty of  silent casting, but the hallway was clear when Harry went up today. He knocked on the professor’s door and heard a squeaky, “Come in!” almost immediately.

“Hello Professor Flitwick,” said Harry, sidling into the cramped office and taking a seat in the creaky chair.

“Good morning. Biscuit?” Professor Flitwick took one for himself and pushed the gilded tin across his desk. Harry selected a hexagonal biscuit and nibbled at it, fighting back a wince. It was unexpectedly spicy. Professor Flitwick munched happily at his own. “So what brings you here today?”

“I’ve got several questions,” Harry said. “Not about lessons, or even charms, but I thought you might be able to help, sir.”

Professor Flitwick smiled at him. “I would certainly be happy to try.”

“Have you heard of heliopathy?” Harry asked, trying to go in order of importance. He’d promised to help Vince ages ago, after all.

“Oh yes, heliopathy, from Greek—an affinity for fire. It’s a bit of a misnomer, since heliopaths have an affinity for all destructive spells. Of course, fire spells are some of the most devastating of them,” said Professor Flitwick.

Harry nodded. “That’s what it said in the books I found, too, but what exactly does it mean to have an affinity? Is it easier for heliopaths to learn curses?”

Professor Flitwick shook his head. “I wouldn’t say that. They have to practise good technique like everybody else. No, the advantage comes after the spell has been cast.” Harry stared blankly at him, and the diminutive professor leaned forward in his seat, smiling conspiratorially. “Yes, our connection to our magic doesn’t end  once it leaves our wands. Take magical fire. We haven’t covered it in lessons yet, so I wouldn’t expect you to know, but certain magical flames are conjurations rather than charms. The difference lies in how much control we have over the result after the fact. Tell me, can you manipulate bluebell flames without casting another spell?”

“Well you can physically move them, right, sir?” said Harry. Professor Flitwick chuckled.

“You’re quite right, of course. Rather, I meant, with magic,” he amended.

Harry thought about it for a moment. “I don’t think so.”

“What about the _flagrate_ spell? Are you familiar with it?” Professor Flitwick asked.

“Yes, sir, Elaine showed us in charms club last year,” Harry said, recalling the flaming signage that she had employed to show them the way to the rotunda. He felt a little bad for thinking it, but Elaine had just been more fun than Penelope. “You’re saying you can move that fire after you cast the spell?”

“Why don’t you give it a try?” Professor Flitwick suggested.

Harry held up his wand and murmured the incantation. His wand tip lit up with a spark and he sketched a burning circle in the air.

“Now what, sir?” he asked. Professor Flitwick simply gestured to his lowered wand, so Harry raised it again and pointed it at his circle, feeling a little foolish as he imagined it expanding. Almost immediately, the flames wobbled and stretched.

“Very good!” said Professor Flitwick, clapping his hands. “That is the essence of a conjuration—a flexible form. With some application of transfiguration concepts we can change the spell as we like. For a heliopath, this understanding comes instinctively for destructive spells, including spells cast by others. They make quite formidable duellists.”

“Are heliopaths common?” Harry asked.

“I’m afraid I don’t know for sure,” said Professor Flitwick. “I’ve met two or three in the duelling circuit, so they mustn’t be extremely rare, but I couldn’t quote the precise prevalence. If I may ask, is there any particular reason you’re researching heliopathy?”

Harry shrugged. “I was looking into blood gifts,” he said. “The others seemed straightforward, but I was confused by heliopathy.”

“Somebody who might know more about blood gifts is Professor Vector,” Professor Flitwick advised.

Harry blinked at the unfamiliar name. It must be the teacher of one of the electives.

“She is the arithmancy instructor,” Professor Flitwick clarified. “Her office is actually on the seventh floor—if you go to the left coming up the staircase instead of right as you normally would to reach Ravenclaw Tower, you’ll find it at the end of that corridor.”

“Thanks, sir. I’ll try asking her,” Harry said. He glanced to the door. There didn’t seem to be anybody waiting to enter, so he continued, “I have some other questions too. Terry said his mum said Hogwarts used to have a school paper?”

“Oh yes, the _Hogwarts Herald_ ,” Professor Flitwick confirmed. “Are you perhaps interested in restarting the journalism club?”

“Not exactly sir, sorry. I was just wondering if you happened to have old issues saved. I wanted to see if I could find some pictures of my parents,” Harry said.

“Your parents?” Professor Flitwick got a rather distracted look. “Do you know when they attended Hogwarts?”

“Around nineteen seventy-six,” Harry said, remembering the date from the paper that morning.

Professor Flitwick pointed his wand at a filing cabinet behind his desk and one of the drawers shot out with a bang. It kept extending until it hit the bookshelf on the other wall. Hopping down from his seat, he paged through some of the papers in the cabinet before looking up with an apologetic mien.

“I thought it might be the case, but unfortunately I’ve only got five years worth of issues, from nineteen eighty to nineteen eighty-five when the club was disbanded. If your parents attended in seventy-six, though, I must have taught them. What were their names?”

“Lily and James Potter. My mum’s name was…” Harry’s face screwed up as he tried to remember Aunt Petunia’s maiden name, “Evans, I think.”

“Oh, Lily Evans! I certainly remember her,” Professor Flitwick said, beaming as he looked slightly to Harry’s left. “I daresay she was one of the best students I ever had. A dab hand at charms, but her real talent lay in her inventiveness.”

Flitwick tapped the side of his head with a gnarled finger.

“You mean she invented new charms?” Harry asked.

“Oh certainly, but much more impressively, she found new uses for old charms. There are already thousands of charms out there, as I’m sure you know, more than anybody could possibly learn. More often than not a student’s exciting new invention turns out to be only a less efficient version of an existing charm!” Professor Flitwick explained, chuckling. “Real progress in the field comes through decreasing redundancy and increasing versatility.”

Harry hummed. “I never thought about it like that. Is that why there are spell series?”

“Precisely! It’s fantastic that you know about spell series already. That’s what Lily Evans wrote her NEWT charms project on—the expansion of the banishment series. The summoning series is quite robust, but its counterpart, banishment, has seen little development over the past century… I apologise, I’m getting carried away.” Professor Flitwick sighed, his smile falling away. “It’s too bad, an awful shame, that she was never able to continue her research.”

Harry nodded. Professor Flitwick stared at him, frowning slightly, as if he wanted to say something else but was having a hard time focusing.

Hurriedly, Harry asked, “What about James Potter?”

“James Potter?” Professor Flitwick murmured, blinking. “Oh, he was a fine student as well. Head Boy in his seventh year.”

There was a long pause, before Harry said, “Right.” He supposed that Professor Flitwick couldn’t think of anything more substantial to say. “Thanks for telling me about them.”

“Of course,” said Professor Flitwick.

“Wait, one more thing,” Harry added, remembering Hermione’s question. “Not charms-related, but Hermione told me she exchanged muggle money to galleons at Gringotts. Isn’t that against the goblin treaty? Do you know how that’s possible?”

To Harry’s surprise, Professor Flitwick chuckled. “Somebody asks about that every year—it’s an open secret. It isn’t against the treaty, you see, because muggle money is not recognised as currency. It’s worthless. Those galleons come from the Hogwarts fund for the needy. It used to be that we simply distributed the funds to muggle-borns, but inevitably some would take offence to what they saw as charity. So we let them ‘exchange’ their money instead.”

“Oh,” said Harry in amazement. This explanation had never once crossed his mind. Hermione would be thrilled to know that she could stop wasting her pounds and just ask for free galleons, instead.

Except she wasn’t excited—she was cross instead. “This is awful! So I’ve just been taking advantage of galleons that could have gone to someone who needed them more? It’s not right. I can afford to buy my own supplies—”

“But you can’t spend muggle money on wizard things. That’s the point,” Harry whispered, glancing around nervously. They were in the library, by the history stacks on the same floor as Madam Pince, and Hermione did not seem to be making any special effort to keep her voice down.

“I could make my own galleons! Buy something muggle, that wizards haven’t got, and sell it,” she said.

Harry thought this proposal over. “Like what?” he finally said. “And who’s going to buy your things?” He knew that Silviu’s company basically used this very scheme, but they obviously had actual contacts willing to buy their ingredients, or whatever it was they peddled.

Hermione frowned and said nothing for almost a minute, obviously thinking furiously. She looked up abruptly with a triumphant grin. “Planners!”

“What?” said Harry.

“I’ll sell planners to other students. I haven’t seen anybody else with one, but they’re so very useful,” she said.

“What are planners?” Harry asked, and immediately regretted it when she rounded on him, grabbed a spiral-bound notebook overflowing with colourful bits and bobs out of her bag, and shoved it in his face.

“You can write down everything you have to do each day, and it’s all in one place. I could sell memo blocks and foldback clips too—they’re really helpful for organisation,” she muttered. To Harry’s bemusement, she immediately slapped her planner onto the table and began making rapid notes in it with a self-inking quill.

Harry left her to it in favour of looking for a transfiguration book that could help him with immaterial conjuration. Petri had provided the incantations and wand movements for the three spells he was supposed to learn, but just trying them as written had given unsatisfactory results. His conjured illusion had come out nothing like he’d imagined, instead resembling a collapsing cone of light, and his ‘ethereal voice’ was slurred and incomprehensible. The less that was said about his attempted pressure conjuration, the better.

Unable to find anything on immaterial conjuration specifically, he gave up and took out a copy of the text for NEWT Transfiguration instead. Madam Pince regarded him with suspicion as she wrote down his name, but did not prevent him from checking it out.

Petri knew his abilities and regularly informed him when things would be too difficult, so Harry assumed he wouldn’t have assigned him an impossible task. Still, the thick volume with its thin pages and tiny print did not inspire a lot of confidence. This book was supposed to be for sixth years. 

He lugged it up to the fifth floor and prepared to duck into the usual empty classroom, when hazy shadows moving behind the gossamer material of its ugly curtain gave him pause. There was somebody in there, and they looked very tall—an older student?

A muffled bang reached his ears. Overcome with curiosity, Harry stepped to the side, shifted the book under one of his arms, and tapped his glasses, looking through the wall. Vince was there with Cassius Warrington, from charms club, who was currently demonstrating some sort of curse that caused a chair to collapse into rubble. Harry felt a sudden stab of hurt and quickly looked away, returning his vision to normal.

“Don’t be silly,” he muttered to himself. Of course Vince had gone to an older student for help. Cassius was in the same house, too, so it would have been easier to get a hold of him. Still, Harry couldn’t help feeling irrationally slighted that Vince was practising spells with somebody else in their space.

That was silly too—the classroom hardly belonged to them. The furniture moved around sometimes, so Harry was sure that other students used the room too. Clutching his book to his chest, he stalked off gloomily, glancing through every door in search of a free practice space. He had no luck and had to trudge up to the next floor. 

As he came up to the landing, there was a loud bang and water splashed into his face. Blinking rapidly, Harry spied the offending window and shot a muttered  _colloportus_ at it, slamming it shut and muting the endless rush of the thunderstorm outside. He drew his robes more closely around himself, shivering a little at the unpleasant draught.

It wasn’t all the weather—he found a familiar ghost  lurking further along the corridor, looking forlornly out into the stormy sky.

“Hello, Sir Nicholas,” Harry said, hoping the ghost would move aside so he could avoid the chilling aura. Unfortunately, he turned and floated closer instead, into the centre of the hallway.

“Hello, Harry,” Nick greeted, smiling distractedly. “What brings you to this corner of the castle?”

“Oh, I’m just looking for an empty classroom to practise some spells,” Harry said. “Say, would you know anything about immaterial conjurations?”

Nick shook his head, which caused it to teeter precariously. “I’m afraid I’m rather rusty when it comes to magic.”

“Right, of course. Sorry. I wasn’t thinking,” Harry said. He hesitated, wondering if it would be rude to ask, but finally went ahead. “How long have you… been around?”

“Oh, some five centuries now. Actually, my five hundredth deathday is coming up this Halloween,” said Nick, puffing out his chest a little. He was smiling, so Harry assumed that this was a good thing.

“Congratulations,” he said. Remembering what his inferi book had to say about ghosts who could not make peace with their deaths, Harry added, “You must be very fierce to have stayed so long.”

“Thank you, that’s kind of you to say so. I am the youngest of us house ghosts, so I fear I have a long way to go. Still, five hundred is respectable, is it not? More than ripe enough to be admitted to the Hunt. To be denied on a technicality! Well. It’s not as if I really wanted to join…”

“Join what?” Harry felt compelled to ask. A bitter scowl had crossed Nick’s face, and the hallway seemed to go just a bit colder than before.

“The Headless Hunt, of course,” said the ghost. “But I’m told I don’t qualify, even though you’d think, wouldn’t you, that being hit forty-five times in the neck with a blunt axe should be more than enough for anybody to be considered beheaded?”

“Right, you would think,” Harry agreed. He winced inwardly, thinking of the passage that had recommended torturing people to death for best results in creating inferi and fierce ghosts. The more agonising and drawn-out the death, the more resentful the spirit. Doubly so if it was an unjust murder. He thought he remembered seeing something about this Headless Hunt, even.

At this point, Nick reached into the pocket of his doublet and produced a folded letter, as translucent as he was, which he opened and began to read out loud. It was a rejection letter of some sort, but Harry had stopped paying attention to his words in favour of attempting to see what was on the page. How could a ghost send and receive letters?

Nick helpfully turned and angled the creased parchment so that Harry could read over his shoulder. Only, as he had suspected, it was entirely blank, at least to his living eye. He shivered as the ghost came too close and brushed his shoulder, dousing it in ice water.

“Don’t listen to him,” Harry said as Nick finished complaining about Sir Patrick Podmore from the Headless Hunt. “He’s just envious of your uniqueness. There must be loads of decapitated ghosts, but how many can say they’re nearly headless? You should be proud.”

“Well, I, yes, of course. You’re right,” said Nick, drawing himself up. “Why should I put stock in what those stuffed shirts in the Hunt have to say? Say, Harry, do you think I’m frightening?”

Given that Nick had bent down with a sort of plaintive look on his face, the answer was a resounding no, but Harry said, “I think you could be very frightening, if you chose to.”

“Yes, I could, couldn’t I? Say… I’ll be having a party for my deathday down in one of the roomier dungeons, on Halloween. Friends from all over the country will be coming in. Would you, well, would you do me the honour of attending? Perhaps put in a good word about my ferocity to Sir Patrick? Oh, but I daresay you would rather attend the feast?”

Nick was staring at him with transparent hopefulness, and Harry felt it would be impossible to deny this request.

“Oh, no, I’ll come,” he said.

“Oh how delightful! Harry Potter at my deathday party!” Nick exclaimed, getting carried away and drifting up towards the ceiling. Harry was staring at him in some legitimate horror. Did the fidelius charm not work on ghosts?

“Harry Potter?” Harry repeated faintly.

Nick floated back down and blinked at him in some confusion. “Yes, Harry Potter will be at my deathday party. Isn’t that so very exciting? Your friends are more than welcome to attend as well. The more the drearier!”

That wasn’t the right expression, Harry was sure, but he was too relieved to see the honest lack of recognition in the ghost’s eyes to care. It wasn’t as if the fidelius charm really mattered. It somehow had no effect on Lord Voldemort, and he had revealed his identity to Professor Dumbledore already, but still, it made him feel safer to have it. At least, with the charm in place, he would be in no danger from unknown enemies.

Nick, now in a boisterous mood, helpfully showed him to a rather spacious broom cupboard before floating off, whistling jauntily. Harry balanced his library book on an upturned pail and began to read about conjuration. Fortunately, he figured out what he had been doing wrong quickly enough. It came up in the third paragraph:

It is prohibitively difficult to conjure something which does not exist, that is, to conjure from imagination rather than memory. All exercises in this book use commonplace items, with the assumption that the reader will have access to examples to guide their work. When performing any conjuration spell, the caster should keep not only the form, but also the identity of the target item firmly in mind.

“ _Imaginis,_ ” Harry murmured, moving his wand in tight squiggle and thinking of Nearly-Headless Nick. A bright flash shot out of his wand, and when he cleared the spots from his vision he found a palm-sized ghost hanging suspended in a cone of light. Well, it was an improvement from only the cone.

The conjuration lost coherence and vanished in moments. He supposed he needed more practice.

He heard a light scratching at the door of the closet. Then the door was thrown open, and Harry turned reflexively with his wand extended, only to find himself face to face with Filch.

“Put that down!” the caretaker yelled, his whole face twisting up. Harry hurriedly stowed his wand. “What are you doing in here? Something nefarious, no doubt. Hiding dungbombs and fireworks.”

“I wasn’t, sir, I was just reading. I swear. Look,” Harry said, pointing to his open book.

“Reading,” Filch repeated sceptically, though he did cease his tirade, narrowing his eyes as if trying to see through the pages. His gaze travelled up to Harry’s chest. When he spotted Ravenclaw blue, he seemed to relax a little. He jabbed his thumb over his shoulder. “Get out.”

Harry scrambled to his feet, barely pausing to grab his book. As he escaped from the closet, Mrs Norris let out a loud meow and wound between his ankles.

“I don’t want to see the likes of you in one of my broom closets again,” Filch muttered, waving his hand. “Now scram!”

Harry didn’t need to be told twice. He practically ran all the way to Ravenclaw Tower, flushed with relief at having escaped detention. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t technically been doing anything wrong. Filch’s unjust wrath was legendary. Harry had never felt more fortunate to be in the house of swots.

He supposed it would be all right to practise conjurations in his dormitory, as long as he was careful to do it away from any furniture. Only, when he arrived, he found Stephen curled up in his bed with a paperback, Terry and Anthony playing chess on Anthony’s bedside table, and Michael snoring from behind closed hangings. Didn’t his dorm mates ever go out?  House of swots, he reminded himself.

Tossing the transfiguration text in his cauldron, Harry exchanged it for his inferius book, which he paged through in search of a mention of the Headless Hunt. This task was complicated by the fact that he couldn’t identify any individual words in the book, but he found the chapter on ghosts quickly enough and slowed down to ‘read’ in more detail, reclining on his bed.

It seemed easier to pick out the content after having gone through the book once already. He skimmed over the unintelligible words on the page, feeling concepts jump out to him.

Ghosts were usually formed by wizards who had died violently and refused to relinquish consciousness. They were imprints made out of emotions, primarily fear and resentment, though they could feed on any emotion to maintain their coherence. The more resentment a ghost had, the fiercer they were, and the more power they could exert on the living to make them experience phantom perceptions and sensations. Otherwise they were completely incapable of interacting with the world.

Murder victims generally left ghosts, though using the killing curse could prevent this outcome. Executions were a prime source of ghosts. There were so many headless ghosts that they had formed a collective of sorts, the Headless Hunt—there it was.

Ghosts from the Headless Hunt could be quite valuable, since they could be bound into headless corpses and made into dulachan, which could ride around town and frighten muggles to death. The tricky part was getting close to one of the Huntsmen and capturing him. Right. Charming. Harry remembered this part now. 

He had no intention of making a headless inferius any time soon, but the opportunity to ask questions of the ghosts of the Headless Hunt, not to mention whatever other ghosts Sir Nicholas had invited, seemed well worth the cost of missing the Halloween feast.

His friends, of course, thought he was mental when he told them.

“Skipping the feast is a bad idea. Just look at what happened last year,” said Vince.

“Last year, you went to the forbidden corridor,” Harry pointed out. “It’s not against the school rules to go to a ghost party.”

“It was good of you to say yes so you wouldn’t hurt Nick’s feelings,” Neville offered. “I suppose you shouldn’t have to suffer through it alone.”

Hannah sighed, though she was smiling. “Well when you put it that way, what kind of friends would we be if we didn’t come along?” Her expression grew severe as she turned to Vince.

“What?” he said, playing dumb.

“You guys don’t have to come,” Harry said quickly.

“We’re coming,” said Hannah, not letting up on her vicious smile. She pointed at Vince. “You’re coming too.”

“Do you think anyone else would be interested?” Harry asked.

Hannah immediately rounded on him with squinted eyes. “No. Only you would be interested in something like this.”

“Hey, what’s that supposed to mean?” Harry muttered.

“Um, Harry, you’re sort of morbid, you know?” Neville said.

Harry shrugged. He couldn’t really deny that.

“You’re completely mental, is what you are, which is why you need us,” Hannah corrected. “We don’t see each other for a week and you replace us with ghosts.”

“You’re the one who was super busy,” Harry said.

“I didn’t forget you guys, though,” Hannah said. “I did my homework and got this.” She rummaged in her bag for a moment before pulling out thick envelope, whose contents she scattered on a nearby chair. Smoothing out one of the folded pieces of parchment, she held it up proudly.

Harry and Neville leaned in close.

_ Tricks for heliopaths to gain an edge over the average duellist _

_1\. Alter the trajectory of own attacks (e.g. split the two tongues of the scorching charm to target two enemies at once)_

_2\. Divert incoming conjurations (practise with water-making charm)_

_3\. Displace spell effects (e.g. avis origin from behind enemy)_

_4\. Delay spell effects (best with reducto, confringo, deprimo)_

There were over a dozen ‘tricks’ on the list. For the most part, they seemed to involve advanced spells, but the first one had used the scorching charm as an example. Harry was sure Vince could learn that one.

“Where’d you get this from?” he asked, reluctantly impressed. Hannah grinned smugly.

“You remember Tonks, right? She’s an auror trainee, and she’s got a blood gift, obviously. So I wrote her to ask if the aurors have got special training for people with useful blood gifts, and it turns out they do.” Her face fell as she looked over the list herself. “I did think there would be more detailed instructions, though. I’m not sure I really understand these.”

“I think I get the first one, at least,” Harry said. “I talked to Professor Flitwick, and he said it isn’t really easier for heliopaths to cast powerful spells. What they’re actually good at is changing spells after they’ve been cast.”

At this, Harry glanced to Vince, who nodded.

“I can feel some strong spells,” he said. “But I can’t really cast any of those.”

“The scorching charm’s not too hard,” Harry told him. “You could try that one, unless your father wrote back with some other suggestion? Has he written back?”

Vince nodded, expression souring immediately. “Yeah. Forget that, though. Let’s try that one that you said. Scorching charm.”

“So what does it mean split two tongues?” Hannah asked.

Instead of explaining, Harry simply demonstrated. Pointing his wand at the wall, away from any potentially flammable chairs, he yelled, “ _Aduro!_ ”

Two plumes of fire lanced out of his wand, curling against the stone and leaving behind a smoky residue. Hannah shrieked and jumped backwards, stumbling into Neville.

“Wicked,” said Vince, grinning.

“Sorry, should’ve given more warning. But yeah, those are the two tongues of fire, and supposedly a heliopath can make them go in separate directions?” Harry said, glancing questioningly at Vince.

“I could feel that,” Vince confirmed. “Could you do it again?”

Harry shrugged and pointed at the same spot, repeating the incantation. This time, to his surprise, the flames listed noticeably to the right.

“Was that you, Vince?” he asked.

Vince grinned. “It worked.”

“Could you maybe do it with something that’s not fire?” Hannah asked. “That makes me nervous. What about the water-making charm on number two?”

“I can’t do that charm yet,” Harry said. “It’s too advanced.”

“Are you serious?” Hannah demanded. “You can shoot fire, but you can’t make water?”

“I suppose I haven’t tried it in a while, so I could try again,” Harry offered. “I don’t remember the incantation, though.”

“ _Aguamenti_ ,” said Neville, to Harry’s surprise, sketching the movement with his index finger. His cheeks grew slightly pink. “I’ve been practising it… but I haven’t got it to work yet, either.”

Harry tried the spell, screwing up his face in concentration as he tried to call up everything he understood about the form and identity of water, like the transfiguration textbook had advised for conjuration.

“Oh!” said Neville, and Harry opened his eyes to see a fine mist spray out the end of his wand. It dispersed almost instantaneously, and Harry gave a rueful smile.

“Well, I suppose that was water,” he said. “But it might as well have not worked at all.”

Neville hummed in the back of his throat. “Don’t say that. That’s more than I’ve ever got.”

Harry sighed and tried a few more times, but couldn’t produce anything more. “Like I said before, too advanced.”

“Fire is more exciting, anyway,” said Vince.

Harry obligingly cast the scorching charm again, and Vince promptly manage to twist it into a spiral.

“Are you having us on?” Harry asked. “You’re great at this. What does your father expect you to do? Make your spells dance a jig?”

“No, I’m really no good,” said Vince. “This is easy ‘cause you’re casting the spell. I can’t do it when it’s my spell.”

Harry gestured for him to demonstrate.

“What was the wand movement for that spell again?” Vince mumbled. Harry showed him.

“ _Aduro!_ ” Vince shouted, and a huge fireball shot out of his wand and set a chair ablaze.

“This is definitely not safe,” Hannah said, her voice about an octave higher than usual. She tried to beat at the fire with her robes, but flinched whenever she got too close and only managed to fan the flames higher.

Harry tried to think of a spell to put out fire that wasn’t water-related but drew a blank. Then a strange thought came to him.

“This is stupid, but let me try something,” he said, waving Hannah to the side. “ _Incendio!_ ”

“Harry, what in Merlin’s name?” she demanded, but fell silent as blue fire trickled out of his wand and flopped onto the chair. It flowed around the regular orange flame, dripping down and forming a languidly flickering puddle.

“Well, that wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for,” Harry muttered. “I thought maybe it’d turn the whole fire into bluebell flames. But this works too. Look… it’s not spreading any more.”

Confined by the inert bluebell flame, the non-magical fire soon ran out of fuel and died out. Armed with this provisional solution, Harry gestured for Vince to try again. Hannah huffed and stood back as far she could, dragging Neville along with her as she continued to mutter about what a terrible idea this was, but they both stayed to watch.

Vince had been telling the truth. He couldn’t even get the spell to come out in its regular form, let alone change its behaviour. On the other hand, whenever it was Harry casting the spell, Vince had no trouble at all reshaping it to his liking.

“Maybe the problem is that you’re not good at doing two things at once?” Harry hypothesised.

“Well yeah, obviously that’s the problem,” Vince agreed. “How the bloody hell are you supposed to do two things at once?”

Harry’s jaw dropped a little, and he had to take a moment to seriously consider this unforeseen obstacle.

“Maybe if you got very good at the spell, so you didn’t have to think about it?” Almost as soon as the words came out of his mouth, Harry had a better idea: “Or maybe, the other way around. Just keep practising your gift with my spell, until it’s so easy that you don’t have to think about it at all.”

“Seconded,” said Hannah immediately. “At least then we’re not at risk of blowing up the classroom.”

There was, admittedly, quite the collection of scorched chairs at this point.

“Maybe you two can practise mending charms?” Harry suggested sheepishly. Hannah rolled her eyes, but took out her wand and began repairing some of the damage.

Harry tried his best to distract Vince by peppering him with questions. “So what does it feel like?”

“Not like anything,” said Vince as he promptly lost control of the flames. He frowned. “I can’t really describe it.”

Harry figured it would be a bit like explaining to a blind person what colours were like, only without even having any words for colour.

“Right… _aduro!_ You can tell where the spell is?” Harry asked.

“Um, no, not exactly,” Vince mumbled. “I just sort of know it’s there, close by.”

“Like when you hear a sound and don’t know exactly where it’s coming from?” Harry asked.

Vince shrugged. “Sort of. But it’s not like I’m hearing it or anything. I kind of feel it in my stomach. Like I’m hungry.”

Harry remembered the distinctive feeling behind his navel when he had tried to cast magic in the dementor-infested forest.

“Actually, I think I’m just hungry,” Vince amended a moment later.

“You can’t be hungry. We’ve just had lunch,” Harry told him.

“Been doing too much magic,” Vince said, screwing up his face. Harry glanced at his perfectly straight scorching spell. Who exactly was doing the magic, here? Rolling his eyes, he let the flames die away and wiped some sweat off his brow. It was getting awfully hot in the room, but it had never occurred to him to learn a cooling charm before.

“Try casting the spell again,” Harry said, prodding Vince in his meaty shoulder.

“It’ll be no good, though,” said Vince, making no move to even grab his wand.

“Whatever, just shut up and try it,” Harry said.

Unfortunately, Vince was right and he still couldn’t cast the spell properly. By this point, Hannah and Neville had finished repairing the chairs and stac ked  them up in one corner.

“It’s sweltering in here,” Hannah complained. “Can we open the window?”

It was pouring outside, but Harry supposed that meant it was nicely cold.

He pointed his wand at the window and muttered, “ _Alohamora_ .” The latch clicked open, but nothing else happened, and he rubbed his head sheepishly at Hannah’s unimpressed look. Neville walked over and shoved the window open, letting in a welcome draught and a generous spray of raindrops. Exhaling a puff of warm air, he reached outside with both arms and let them hang there for a few moments.

“That feels good,” he said, mopping at his red face with a sodden robe sleeve.

“We could take a break, let it cool down a bit,” Vince suggested. Harry sighed and put his wand in his pocket.

“When I talked to Professor Flitwick, he also mentioned that Professor Vector, the arithmancy teacher, might know more about blood gifts,” he said, ambling over to the window and closing his eyes as he allowed the icy rain to pelt his face. “Do you think it would help if we asked her?”

“I think Vince just needs multitasking practice,” said Hannah. “We should do it with something safer. Something fun, even. How about you do the levitation charm while we play exploding snap?”

Bemusement crept onto Vince’s face as he no doubt tried to weigh the effort of having to do the charm against the pleasure of card games.

Harry said, “That’s a great idea,” before Vince could manage to object. “Have you got a deck?”

Hannah shook her head.

“No, we usually use Draco’s,” Vince said.

Harry looked to Neville, who shrugged. “I don’t really like that game, to be honest. It’s stressful.”

“Harry, you’ve got cards, right? For your divination thing?” Hannah asked suddenly.

“Well, yes, but those are _tarot_ cards,” said Harry, but Hannah had already clapped her hands together in victory.

“I’m sure we can make it work,” she said. Reluctantly, Harry took out his deck and thumbed through it, removing the major arcana and the knaves. He supposed that what was left was essentially a standard deck of playing cards.

“Do they explode?” Vince asked.

“I wouldn’t think so, but we can play regular snap too,” Hannah said, shuffling the deck rather expertly. “It’ll be easier to start with, anyway. This is practice for doing two things at once, remember? Find something to levitate.”

Harry quickly gathered up his major arcana and hid them back in his card case before they could become the victims of a botched levitation charm. Vince was probably as liable to set his target on fire as he was to actually lift it up. They settled on using a bit of parchment instead.

They started the game, but Harry couldn’t draw a card without feeling extremely uneasy. His pile seemed to be forecasting an injury, followed by mistake and an unwelcome discovery. The golden border of the two of swords glittered with a silent threat.

“Snap!” he said belatedly, as he laid it down on the two of cups, half-expecting the card to explode on him. Of course, nothing happened, and he collected the central pile and shuffled it into his own.

“Bugger!” Vince cried, dropping the parchment. “This isn’t fair. You guys have to levitate something too.”

“I suppose,” Hannah agreed, and took out more parchment for everybody else. Harry levitated his piece absently. The hardest part was having to play snap with his non-dominant hand.

After the first round, Harry transferred his wand to his left hand and mimed the movement for the levitation charm.

“What are you doing?” Hannah asked, raising both eyebrows.

“Does it matter which hand you hold your wand in?” Harry wondered. His left hand felt awkward and uncoordinated, but the sweeping motion of the swish was still manageable. The question was, should he do the motion in the same direction, or should he invert it?

“I’m not sure, but when I was trying out wands, Ollivander asked me which was my wand hand,” Hannah said.

“Trying out wands?” Harry asked. “How did you decide which one to pick?”

He looked down at his own wand, trying to remember if he had chosen it or not. He rather thought that Petri had just given him one from his collection. It was made of willow, and willow was good for charms, so he supposed that was a consideration.

“I didn’t really decide,” Hannah said. “When I waved my wand, a bunch of sparks just came out, and Ollivander said it was the one. I mean, it makes sense. The others I tried didn’t react at all.”

Harry looked to Neville and Vince. Neville shrugged.

“I’ve got my dad’s wand,” he murmured.

“I’ve got my great grandfather’s,” Vince said.

“So it’s common for wands to be passed down in the family?” Harry asked, wondering where his parents’ wands were.

“Depends on the family,” said Vince. “Some think the wand should be buried with the wizard.”

“That makes sense,” Harry said. Perhaps that was the case with his family.

Vince grunted. “Waste of a perfectly good wand, to let it rot in the dirt.”

“They are pretty expensive,” Hannah agreed. “Then again, they’re something you’re supposed to use your whole life.”

“ _Wingardium leviosa_ ,” Harry murmured. Before he could even finish the swish, he felt it—a warning tingle in his wrist. He couldn’t abort the motion. Something seemed to shift into place and pain flashed through his hand. The parchment fluttered into the air as Harry dropped his wand, crying out and rubbing at his left arm.

Hannah picked it up for him before it could roll away and held it out. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Harry said. The pain had already passed. He took his wand with his right hand this time, closing his fingers around the handle somewhat gingerly.

“No wonder you never see people do magic with their off hand,” Neville said.

Harry shook his head, remembering with painful clarity how Lord Voldemort had used this hand to break a dementor’s grip. “I don’t think it’s that. I—I just forgot that I hurt my hand a while ago, that’s all. Could one of you try it out?”

He received three identical flat looks.

“Can’t you just do magic normally, instead of trying weird things?” Hannah asked. “You can experiment when you’re older and not about to give me a heart attack.”

Vince grunted in agreement.

“Right, sorry,” said Harry, rubbing the back of his head. “Let’s get back to the game.”

“I’d like to get a snack,” Vince said.

“From where?” Harry asked.

“Draco’s house elf makes us snacks sometimes.”

Of course. Draco’s house elf probably also does your homework, Harry thought.

“You haven’t got your own house elf?” he asked instead.

“Course not,” said Vince. “If I was rich as Draco, I wouldn’t need to—well, I’d be rich.”

“Only really old and wealthy families have got house elves,” Neville said. “There just aren’t that many of them around, and nobody would want to get rid of a good elf anyway. If somebody’s freed one, there’s probably something seriously wrong with it. Gran says our family used to have one, when she was a kid, but it went batty and almost drowned my great uncle Algie in the bath, so they had to dismiss it.”

Harry wondered how Petri had come by Rosenkol, if all this was true. Then again, by general standards, there probably  _was_ something seriously wrong with Rosenkol. He couldn’t cook or clean, had an imperious attitude, and even other house elves shunned him.

Vince stood up to leave, and nobody else seemed much interested in continuing the game, so Harry took the opportunity to rescue his tarot deck and hide it away from further abuse.

With the rest of the afternoon free and all his homework completed, Harry decided to venture up into the divination professor’s domain. Dumbledore hadn’t set a date for their next meeting yet—in fact, Harry hadn’t seen Dumbledore in ages, not even at meals—but Harry wanted to make sure he had something about Voldemort’s past to bring up when the time came.

The North Tower, where Professor Trelawney supposedly lived, turned out to be egregiously tall. Harry was wheezing and doubled over, clutching at the burning stitch in his side, by the time he stumbled onto a cramped circular landing and found himself without further stairs to traverse. For a moment, he was beset by despair at perhaps having taken a wrong turn—then he looked up and saw the trap door.

As if it had been waiting for him to acknowledge it, the door swung open creakily and a metallic ladder dropped down. Heartened by this clear invitation, Harry grabbed a rung with renewed vigour and climbed up.

Putting his head through the entrance was like diving into another world. Harry coughed as he breathed in a lungful of thick incense, which settled like sweet tar in the back of his throat. The entire room was dim and hazy, illuminated only by a flickering fireplace and a smattering of thick candles.  A variety of armchairs, little tables, and pouffes  were  crammed into the tiny space  with no apparent organisation.

“There you are!” said a raspy voice. Harry’s head whipped to the side, displacing a cloud of smoke, and his gaze met a pair of gigantic, piercing eyes that lurked in the shadow of a tall armchair. He yelped and almost lost his grip on the ladder. 

“I’ve been expecting you, my dear.” There was a woman attached to those eyes, pointing at him with a thin and spindly arm. A gossamer violet shawl hung over her like a spider’s web, and countless bangles and beads jingled as she moved.

“Professor Trelawney?” Harry said, more faintly than he would have liked.

“Of course, my dear, who else would I be?” The professor crooked her wrist in invitation. Harry climbed the rest of the way into the stuffy room, lowering the trap door cautiously behind him.

“Professor Dumbledore told you I was coming, then?” Harry asked. Professor Trelawney, who had taken a seat in the armchair now, peered at him through her gigantic glasses, looking distinctly unimpressed.

“The headmaster does not much enjoy my company, and I do not often venture down into the school. The hullabaloo of mundane life clouds my sight,” she murmured, the large silver bangle on her wrist jingling as she brushed a wild lock of hair behind her ear. “Nonetheless, I was expecting you, my dear, as I said. Come, have a seat. No—first, get yourself a teacup.” She gestured to a shelf beside the fireplace, where a dozen tea sets were arrayed. Harry took a cup with a blue and green geometric pattern.

“Are we doing tessomancy, Professor?” he asked, as Professor Trelawney poured him tea from a large silver teapot. Her eyes crinkled.

“We are enjoying some afternoon tea, my dear, though I am pleased that you have such an interest in my subject that you will be taking Divination next year,” she said.

“Right,” said Harry, even though it hadn’t been a question. He swirled the tea around in his cup and took a cautious sip. It was so bitter that his eyes watered—it must been steeping for ages. He had to fight not to make a face as he drained the cup and looked down into the dregs.

Right in the middle was a four-legged blob. Harry scowled at it.

“My dear, you have seen something?” asked Professor Trelawney.

Harry shrugged. “The Grim,” he said. Professor Trelawney sat bolt upright, leaning forward, so he tilted his cup for her to take a look.

“The Grim,” she whispered, “My dear boy—you know what this means, do you not?”

“Death,” Harry said. “That’s a good starting place, right?”

Professor Trelawney’s pale, insect-like eyes focused on him, as if seeing him for the first time. “Of course. You are absolutely correct, my dear. And yes—of course, it is clear now—you came here today to study the one who will cause your death. How dreadful, my dear, how terrible.”

She said this haltingly, as if reading off a blurry page that only she could see, but with every word her pace quickened, until she was quite breathless at the end.

“Yes, Professor, I’d like it if you could help me scry for his past. I don’t know too much about scrying, though,” he said.

“Of course you don’t, my dear—it’s a NEWT topic, very difficult. But I see that you have the requisite gift, so worry not. I shall teach you all that you need to know. Do you have a preferred medium?” asked Professor Trelawney.

“Tarot,” Harry said, extracting his deck from his robe pocket and pouring it out of its box onto the table.

“May I?” said Professor Trelawney, extending spindly fingers. Harry nodded, and she gathered the deck up in her hands and began flipping cards one at a time. “Oh dear,” she mumbled. “A false friend and a false enemy await. What an unhappy pair. Hm. Yes. Oh!”

She gasped and looked up, almost staring through him.

“What is it?” Harry asked.

“It would be better not to say. Don’t ask me,” she said.

Harry felt the very strong urge to ask anyway, but he forcibly kept silent and nodded, though he could not resist sneaking a peek at the card she was looking at. It was the seven of wands. Something powerful? Before he could speculate too much, she gathered up the upturned cards and shuffled them back into the deck, sliding it across the table.

“Let me tell you a little about scrying before we begin, my dear. Scrying is the art of following the woven threads of fate. It is the opposite of fortune telling. You already know the destination—it is now, the present. What you wish to see is the journey. Of course, the journey is not one point, not even one path, but an infinite number of entangled threads. Lay your cards out in a cardinal path,” said Professor Trelawney.

Harry, who had been listening raptly, started at the abrupt instruction and gave her a blank stare.

“A cross—one card face up in the middle and four face down on each side of it. Yes, that’s it, dear,” she said as Harry hesitantly dealt out five cards. “The centre card represents the present. What do you see?”

It was the four of swords. “A chaotic relationship,” he said.

Professor Trelawney leaned forward. “Come now, my dear, there’s much more than that. I know you see it. Tell me everything.”

Harry hesitated. He supposed she was right—he had immediately drawn some conclusions, almost faster than he could blink. “My enemy and I came to an agreement. But we both still know that we’re enemies. It’s just a truce, for now. I don’t know how long it’ll last. I can’t control anything about it.”

“Cannot, or do not know how to?” asked Professor Trelawney.

“I don’t know how, I suppose,” Harry agreed.

“Beginning in the east, where the sun rises, search for the answer.” Professor Trelawney pointed to Harry’s right, thankfully saving him the trouble of having to figure out which side was east. He flipped the card face up. Thirteen of stars.

“Luck? A lucky discovery. What could that be?” Harry muttered to himself.

“Will you follow the eastern path into the heart of the matter?” asked Professor Trelawney.

“What happens if I do?” Harry asked.

“The eastern path is quite direct. But beware the short and simple route, my dear, for it will carry you past treachery and treasure alike,” said the professor.

Harry blinked rapidly, trying to untangle this obtuse metaphor.

“So I might miss a lot of details?” he asked. Professor Trelawney nodded, looking a little put out. “What are the others?” Harry gestured to the remaining face down cards.

“The southern path is safe and well-travelled. In the familiar you might occasionally find a novel fragment,” she said. Harry interpreted this to mean that he would not discover much new information, though he was more likely to understand what he saw.

He shook his head. “I need to find out something rather obscure,” he said. Ideally, he wanted to look deep into Lord Voldemort’s past, not just into recent occurrences that he had personally experienced.

“The western path may help you there. Venture down the winding way of the unknown, and perhaps you will find yourself where you need to be. The northern path, too, may suit your purposes. Dangerous secrets await you there, if you can manage to decipher them.” Professor Trelawney met his eyes with a serious mien. “I must warn you, my dear, that the northern path is a very difficult one. Your inner eye must be perfectly disciplined in order to see straight and true without being led astray.”

Harry wasn’t sure he had quite that much trust in his inner eye yet. “I’ll try the western path,” he said.

“You must begin in the east, then go south, and then west. Always,” said Professor Trelawney, gesturing for him to proceed.

Harry turned over the south card and examined it briefly. “An unsuccessful attempt. That was when the Dark Lord tried to kill me as a baby, I suppose.” He flipped the west card. The Fool, reversed. “Absence? Abandonment?”

“Always begin with what you know and keep in mind what you wish to divine,” Professor Trelawney advised.

“Voldemort—” Professor Trelawney flinched, and Harry amended, “the Dark Lord, sorry, went abroad, somewhere. Right. He left Britain—that’s the abandonment, then?”

Professor Trelawney nodded, waving her hand. Its many rings glittered entrancingly in the firelight. “Trust your intuitions, my dear. Do not let doubt cloud your sight.”

“Right. So he left Britain… do I put down another card?” Harry asked, looking back at the deck in his hand.

The professor pointed to the spot adjacent to the west card with a claw-like, turquoise nail, drawing a vertical line. “Three cards, face down. Now flip the centre card, and either one of the others. Only one. That is of vital importance.”

“Why is that, Professor?” Harry asked, choosing the top card.

“We, with our mortal eyes, cannot know everything. The unseen card represents the unknown. To look at it is to demand more than can be given. Only if you do not look, is the truth written in the cards,” Professor Trelawney explained gravely.

“You mean, if I flipped this card over right now, everything I saw before would be invalid?” Harry asked.

“Precisely, my dear. That is why you must never reveal the entire path,” Professor Trelawney confirmed.

“I don’t understand,” Harry murmured, looking at the upturned cards. Twelve of wands, one of cups. The perfect self. “How can what I’ve seen be true, but if I flip a card, be false instead?”

Professor Trelawney smiled and adjusted her gigantic spectacles to better magnify her eyes. “My dear, the truth is what it is. It is the state of your inner eye which is in question. Will you see the truth and accept it? Or will you have seen only what you wished to see all along?”

Harry still did not completely understand. Were the cards not already there on the table? Still, he understood the important point—he shouldn’t flip the other card if he wanted this to work.

“Right,” Harry muttered. “So the Dark Lord left, and then there was a perfect self? Or first there was a perfect self? What order is this in?”

“The threads of fate are not woven minute by minute, as we live them,” Professor Trelawney told him cryptically. “They care only for cause and effect. Not then and before, but because and therefore.”

“So it could be either?” Harry asked.

“Focus on the cards, dear, and tell me what you see,” said Professor Trelawney. “I fear you are needlessly clouding your sight with concern for little details.”

Harry nodded and took a deep breath, looking back down at the L-shaped set of upturned cards. “The Dark Lord left Britain… because he wanted to perfect himself. Oh.”

Professor Trelawney smiled vaguely at him. “There, you see, my dear? Simple enough, wasn’t it?”

“I suppose. Now what, Professor?”

She waved her hand. “Continue in the same fashion. Three cards, from where you ended last.”

“And I can keep doing this forever? Until I run out of cards?” Harry asked.

Professor Trelawney harrumphed, and Harry got the awkward feeling that he was asking particularly annoying questions, probably the sort that Petri would have cursed him for. “Of course not. You tell me why,” she said.

“Well… the cards are fixed, so if I put them all down there’s no randomness any more towards the end. So there’s nothing even magic can do to show something meaningful?”

Harry thought his answer sounded quite plausible, but Professor Trelawney scoffed.

“My dear, this is not arithmancy. Randomness does not come into play.” She sighed. “I suppose you haven’t yet made a formal study of divination, so I shan’t be too hard on you. You cannot keep asking endless questions because there is a limit to how much you can coherently see. Remember that the thread of fate is a chain of cause and effect. You always begin in the present, with what you know. With every step, you move farther and farther away from the known until you are reduced to idle speculation. But perhaps it is best if you see for yourself. Go on.”

Harry obligingly laid down more cards. The perfect self forked into ‘distance’ and ‘meeting the right people’, which led to a ‘discovery’ and ‘stability’.

“So he wanted to perfect himself, which led him to travel far away until he met some people who could help him. Then he learned about… immortality! That must be it,” Harry muttered. He frowned. Hadn’t he already known all this? Dumbledore had told him that Voldemort must have gone out of the country to find information on souls.

At least this was some confirmation. And actually, there was something new here. Voldemort had learned whatever it was from people, not books. Harry wasn’t sure if that was helpful information, but it was  _something_ .

He put down more cards. “So he was… serene… for a long time. Then he had two of something? Something innocent?”

Professor Trelawney regarded him with aloofness.

“All right, I understand. It just stops making sense after a while,” Harry said, peering down at his snaking western path. He felt the itching urge to see what the cards he hadn’t looked at were, but held himself in check.

“Rather than forging onward, my dear, you may be better served by carefully considering what the cards have already revealed to you,” Professor Trelawney said. “For example, tell me what this ten of cups means.”

“A long way away, somewhere far,” Harry said.

“Unconventional,” Professor Trelawney remarked. “Traditionally it signifies prosperity and closeness to home.”

Harry flushed. “I sort of just invented meanings when I made this deck.”

Professor Trelawney gave him a sharp look. “My dear, one never simply ‘invents’ meaning. No—you chose precisely the meaning that you were shown, did you not?”

Harry shrugged. Professor Trelawney nodded knowingly.

“Tell me more,” she said.

“More?” Harry repeated.

Impatiently, Professor Trelawney tapped the ten of cups with a long nail. “A faraway place. Where is that then? Far on foot? By broomstick? Portkey?”

That was a good point. Harry frowned. Wizards could apparate and use portkeys to cross vast distances in an instant. So what exactly did ‘far’ mean here?

“It’s another country,” he said, because he knew that from what Professor Dumbledore had said.

“France? Persia? Mongolia?” Professor Trelawney pressed.

“Sorry, Professor, but how would I know that from looking at the card?” Harry asked.

“What’s the farthest country you can think of?” Professor Trelawney asked. “Without dithering.”

“China, I suppose,” Harry said. Was China or America farther?

“Well there you are. China is what you have seen in the cards. Incidentally, you are completely incorrect. Australia, for instance, is much farther from here than China is,” Professor Trelawney told him.

“Then shouldn’t it be Australia?” Harry asked, flummoxed.

Professor Trelawney heaved a dramatic sigh. “My dear, you must learn to see beyond the mundane conception of truth and falsity. That Australia is farther than China does nothing to change the meaning given by this card. Do you understand?”

Harry frowned, trying to wrap his head around this seemingly paradoxical declaration. “So all that matters is that I thought that it was China? Even if I was wrong? I’m sorry, Professor, but I don’t really understand how that works.”

“It is quite simple, I should think. There is no meaning in the cards beyond that which your magic lends them. How can a card possibly have a meaning that you wouldn’t think of? Incidentally,” here, Professor Trelawney’s gaze sharpened, “beware a weeping woman.”

“Is that a prediction?” Harry asked.

“A portent,” Professor Trelawney corrected. “They come to me often. If you hone your gift carefully, you may come to notice them in time, even without the aid of any tools.”

“Notice them?” Harry repeated.

“Yes, dear. It is likely that you are constantly experiencing them already. Little thoughts and speculations that flit through your mind, which you are liable to forget without remarking, but which come to pass some time later. I find it helpful to speak such thoughts aloud as I have them,” said Professor Trelawney.

Harry nodded, though he rather thought he might get hexed if he went around telling people to beware this or that with no context. Perhaps that was a portent right there.

He glanced back down to the cards, wondering if there was more information to extract. What sorts of people had the Dark Lord met? People to teach him—that had been his first thought, he remembered.

“Professor, Is the first thing you think of when you see the cards always right?” he asked.

“Of course not,” said Professor Trelawney, shaking her head. “You could very well be mistaken, or suffer from a clouded inner eye. You will wish to know, of course, how you might discern true sight from imagination or delusion. The best advice that I can give you is to look to spontaneity. If your own thoughts surprise you, then that is a clear sign… at other times, only experience will help you.”

“So if I think that the other people the Dark Lord met—the thirteen of swords—taught him what he was looking for… is that off the mark?” Harry muttered. “Is it surprising? I suppose so.” After all, if Voldemort was supposed to have committed some awful transgression against his soul, what were the odds that other people not only knew the way to do it, but were willing to teach others?

Then again, there was no reason to assume that they had given the Dark Lord information voluntarily. Was there? It would be surprising.

“I still don’t understand,” Harry finally huffed. “Sorry, Professor, but if something’s surprising, isn’t that also a reason to think it’s a mistake? Things are only surprising because they’re unlikely.”

“You misunderstand, dear. For a thought to be surprising to you is not the same thing as for it to be surprising, were the thought true. You surprise yourself when you suspect something that you would not likely have thought of without the cards,” Professor Trelawney explained.

Harry pursed his lips, still unsatisfied. By that definition, any nonsense he came up with while looking at the cards might well be true.

The lines in Professor Trelawney’s face softened. “Have patience, my dear. You are only just beginning your journey to hone your inner eye. The most important thing is to keep an open and broad mind. The cards do not lie. Only your preconceptions prevent you from seeing the truth. Now, I fear your argumentative friend will be missing you if you do not make haste to dinner.”

“Oh!” Harry checked the time and found that indeed, dinner had already started. “Sorry for taking up so much of your time, Professor. Thanks for your help.”

“A pleasure, dear,” Professor Trelawney murmured airily. Harry took one last look at the array laid out on the table to commit the cards of note to memory, and then swept it all up and slipped his deck back into its box.

“Goodbye, Professor.” He paused as he opened the trap door. “May I come back later if I have questions?”

“Oh, you will be back,” Professor Trelawney told him.

Nodding, Harry climbed down the ladder and began his lengthy journey down into the castle proper. Only his preconceptions prevented him from seeing the truth…

Wasn’t it a preconception of his that nobody would willingly teach Voldemort horrible dark magic? Just because the Dark Lord was capable of getting what he wanted by magical force, did not mean that he couldn’t just as well talk it out of someone. Harry knew first hand that, evil though he might be, Voldemort  had terribly interesting things to say.

“There you are, Harry!” Lisa called to him as soon as he walked up to the Ravenclaw table. “Listen, we need your help. Do you know the timing charm?”

“Exspectato?” Harry asked, helping himself to risotto and pork chops.

“Yes! That one.” She turned to Terry with a smug, “I told you he would know it,” before returning to Harry—“How does it work? Terry and I have been trying for hours but we can’t get it to do anything. The Standard Book doesn’t explain it at all. All it has is the wand movement and incantation.”

Harry frowned. “What do you mean how does it work? You just say the spell you want to delay and then the timing charm. You’ve got to cast them one after the other without pausing.”

“Oh, the timing charm comes after,” Lisa said, smacking her forehead with her palm. “Why didn’t we think of that?”

“Because it doesn’t make any sense?” Terry offered around a bite of diricawl leg.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Lisa told him, wrinkling her nose.

“Why are you trying to cast the timing charm?” Harry asked.

Lisa sighed and rolled her eyes. “Oh, it’s just for a silly prank. Terry wants revenge for when the Weasley twins got him with a glitter bomb.”

Harry blinked. “I don’t remember that.”

“It was right before racing practice!” Terry moaned. “I had to show my face in front of Flint sparkling like a snitch.”

“Does Flint even care about that kind of thing?” Harry asked sceptically, still failing to recall anything of the sort. It must have been one of the times he had skipped practice. 

Ignoring his question completely, Terry said, “So we’re just going to humiliate them in front of Wood. That’s fair, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think it’s possible to humiliate the Weasley twins,” Harry said. “They’d probably just laugh it off no matter what.”

“Stop ruining my dreams with logic,” Terry complained.

Harry grinned. “What kind of friend would I be if I didn’t protect you from your own stupidity?”

Lisa snorted. “If he wants to  doom himself, just let him. It’ll be funny no matter what.”

“Now you’re really making me pre-regret this,” Terry muttered.

“Pre-regret?” Lisa repeated, laughing. “You mean you won’t do it then?”

Terry shook his head. “You know how regret is when you do something and afterwards, think you really shouldn’t have done it? Well pre-regret is when you haven’t done something foolish yet, but you know you’re going to do it anyway.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Lisa said, doubling over with mirth, but Harry’s face fell. 

He pushed his risotto pensively across his plate. Pre-regret. He knew that feeling all too well. It asserted itself every time he acquiesced to the Dark Lord’s demands, forcing him to wonder whether there might be some other, better option. But Harry knew that there wasn’t, that the alternative was death, so it was a pointless, irrational emotion. Just as regret could not change the past, it would never be enough to prevent the foreseen future.


	48. Guest

Halloween unfortunately wasn't a holiday from schoolwork, so Harry found himself working on essays all the way up until it was time to leave for Nick's deathday party.

"You don't have to come," he told his friends again. Hannah and Neville both looked queasy, and Vince just looked hungry, as he always did. Somehow, Harry doubted that there would be refreshments at a ghost party.

"Maybe we can go to the feast first," Vince suggested.

"Didn't you say the party was starting at seven?" Hannah said, checking the time. "It's quarter til."

Harry nodded. "It's the same time as the feast, so we'll probably miss most of it even if we try to go after. I can just go alone," he said.

"Nonsense," said Hannah, eyeing Vince threateningly. "We said we were going to go, so we're going."

"All right. Let's go then," Harry said, shrugging.

Nick hadn't actually specified where exactly the party was to be held, only that it was in one of the larger dungeons. Since the layout of the dungeons was essentially linear, Harry figured they would find it if they just kept walking.

"You lot go on ahead, I need to use the loo," said Vince, as they reached the first floor, already lumbering off to the side and through the door.

"Should we wait?" Neville asked.

"He'll catch up," Harry said, half-suspecting that Vince was pulling some basic subterfuge to lose them and double back to the Great Hall for the feast. It was hardly a mystery how the boy's mind worked when it came to food.

"He's trying to escape, isn't he?" Hannah muttered, tossing a sceptical glance back at the boy's loo. "Why does he always have to lie about everything? He could've just said he wasn't interested."

"He's a Slytherin," Harry pointed out. "And you were sort of insisting, you know. I think it was pretty clear he didn't want to come. We're not all Hufflepuffs." She scowled and batted at his shoulder with a limp hand.

"Merlin knows I'm only here because of you, Harry. And I know you promised Nearly-Headless Nick, but you seem pretty interested in this ghost party," she said.

"Well, the Headless Hunt is going to be there. I've read about them, so it's sort of wicked to get to see them in real life," Harry explained.

"You've read about them? So what's so special about these ghosts?" Hannah shuddered at the word 'ghost', and for a tiny moment, Harry regretted having her come. But she was the one who had had the idea, and anyway, it was a once-in-a-lifetime educational opportunity.

"The Headless Hunt are all ghosts who were beheaded. I suppose that's obvious. They're some of the strongest ghosts because of how they died," Harry said. "They have a lot of resentful energy, so they can interact with the environment and almost touch things."

He definitely wasn't interested in creating a dulachan, but that didn't mean it couldn't be useful anyway to make friends with the ghosts in the Hunt.

"Peeves can touch things," Hannah muttered.

"Peeves is a poltergeist," said Harry, rolling his eyes. "That's totally different. I read that the Headless Hunt can knock the wind of people, or chill them so badly that they die on the spot."

Hannah punched him on the arm. "Don't sound so delighted—that's awful."

"Nick doesn't like them much," Neville said. "He was complaining about them to everybody who would listen up in Gryffindor Tower."

Harry shrugged. "Nick is just envious because he can't join them. But he was essentially beheaded. Maybe he has as much resentment as any of them. I'd be angry if someone tried to chop my head off and didn't even do a good job of it."

"He's so nice, though," Neville said. "And he's having a deathday party, to celebrate. So it's been a few centuries, right? Maybe he's got over it by now."

"Yeah. Five hundredth deathday, I think he said," Harry confirmed.

In the next corridor, black candles burning with eerie cobalt flame had replaced the usual torches, suggesting that they were moving in the right direction. Harry shivered as the air grew colder by the minute. He cast a discreet hot air charm around them. It was one thing to read about being chilled to death, and another to experience it.

"What's that sound?" Hannah demanded suddenly, screwing up her face. Harry glanced to her in some confusion, but a moment later the sound reached his ears as well. It was some sort of awful scraping and screeching noise, like nails on a chalkboard, and it was getting louder as they continued down the corridor.

The sound resolved itself as they turned the corner, settling into a rhythmic background of scrapes and clicks accompanying a haunting melody like nothing Harry had ever heard before. Nick, who was standing before a curtained archway, greeted them solemnly and ushered them inside.

The buffer of hot air that Harry had been circulating evaporated feebly into the frigid atmosphere. Harry's eyes darted around the cavernous room in awe at the hundreds of ghosts milling about, pearly and almost solid-looking in the harsh blue light as they chattered and danced with ethereal vivacity to the strange music.

"What instruments are those?" Hannah whispered, pointing to the live (for a given definition of live) performers up on a platform in the back. An eclectic contingent of ghosts drew pearly bows over the edges of something shimmering and quivering, perhaps a thin metal sheet.

"Dunno, I don't know anything about instruments," Harry said. He was more curious about how the ghosts were able to play whatever they were in the first place.

"They're… saws?" Hannah murmured, eyebrows rising into her hairline. She dragged Harry and Neville forward to take a closer look, dodging behind a woman with a chain around her neck and a portly man puffing on a translucent pipe.

They were indeed saws, small and large, of the variety that might have been found in Uncle Vernon's tool shed. Eerie, warbling notes rang out as they bent and contorted against the bows.

"Impressive, isn't it? Old Nick's outdone himself, getting the Spectral Septette here." Harry whirled around to see a woman with dark tear-tracks on her long face gliding up to them.

"How do they play the saws?" Harry couldn't help asking.

"With a precise touch. I tried it myself once, but it's altogether too tiring. I prefer singing these days," said the ghostly woman. She held out a hand. "Wilma Wentworth. They call me the Wailing Widow."

"Harry," said Harry, shaking her hand gingerly. He was surprised to feel some resistance against his palm, though it was almost blotted out by the overwhelming chill, and he had to pull away after a second.

"Call me Wilma," said the Wailing Widow. "What brings the living to a celebration of the dead?"

"Nick invited us," Harry said. He looked around the room again. "I suppose we're the only living guests, though. I didn't know Hogwarts had so many ghosts."

Wilma laughed, and the hairs on the back of Harry's neck stood up. "Most of us are just visiting. I myself came up from Kent."

"Kent?" Harry repeated, screwing up his face as tried to envision the distance on a map. Kent was somewhere near Surrey, and Hogwarts was in Scotland! "How do ghosts travel?"

He'd never read anything about that. Surely there weren't ghostly express trains, but just as surely they hadn't walked the whole way.

"Oh, we simply find ourselves where we're needed," Wilma told him.

"Anywhere?" Harry asked.

"Anywhere we'd been to when we were alive," she said.

"That's dead useful," Harry said. Wilma laughed again, and he shivered.

"What use is anything to the dead?" she murmured. A melancholy look stole over her face, and transparent tears slipped down her cheeks along well-worn paths. "Pardon me." She floated away.

"Did I offend her?" Harry whispered, turning to his friends.

Hannah shrugged, looking uncomfortable. "I don't know. Ghosts are weird."

A loud crash and a scream punctuated the end of her remark, and they both glanced to the back of the dungeon to find a brightly coloured Peeves whizzing about a shrieking ghost girl. As they looked on, he launched a dish through her head, cackling as it shattered against the stone wall.

Nobody seemed to care that the poltergeist was making a scene—nobody besides the girl, who turned and ran out of the dungeon, transparent tears and snot streaming down her face. Peeves streaked after her gleefully, singing, "Ugly, wimpy, plump, and pimply!"

"Is he gone?" Neville asked in a small voice, and Harry turned to find him half-crouched behind Hannah with his hands over his head.

"Peeves? Yeah," said Harry, and Neville straightened up with a relieved sigh.

"Peeves really hates me," he mumbled. "And by that I mean he loves me. Ever since he found out my name was Longbottom."

Harry tried to put a sympathetic expression on his face, but it just ended up awkward. "Well, yeah," he finally said, coughing. "That's pretty unfortunate."

"I don't know why they let Peeves stay in the castle. He's awful," Hannah complained.

"I don't think it's a matter of letting him stay. It's more like they can't get rid of him," Harry said. "Poltergeists are pretty much indestructible once they form. They'd have to evacuate the school for a century to bore him out of existence."

"Really? How come you know so much about ghosts, anyway?" Hannah asked.

"I read about them. For fun," Harry said vaguely, which was only half a lie. It hadn't been fun back then, when he had been new to his apprenticeship and new to the wizarding world, desperately trying to stay afloat, but it was interesting trivia now, and he didn't regret what he had learned.

"Let's have a look at the food," Neville suggested. They ambled towards the refreshments in the back, taking care not to step through anybody. A repellent smell hit Harry's nose before they were even halfway there.

"Ugh. Smells mouldy," he said, and found out that he had been right on the mark. A feast of fuzzy cheeses, spotted breads, and decaying meats had been laid out on a black tablecloth. Ghosts were taking turns passing through the dishes with their mouths open.

"Does that actually work?" Hannah whispered.

"Don't think so," Harry said, bemused. He surveyed the spread and noted the centrepiece—a tombstone-shaped sheet cake with thick grey icing. "Do you reckon that cake's edible?"

"I wouldn't bet on it," Neville muttered, covering his nose.

Spurred on by the gnawing emptiness in his stomach, Harry crept forward and examined the untouched cake. Well of course—none of the ghosts were going to be grabbing a slice. There weren't any utensils, but he was a wizard.

" _Diffindo_ ," he muttered, shaving off a corner. " _Locomotor_." He braced himself as he moved the bit of cake closer, half expecting the inside to be as grey as the outside or perhaps full of maggots, but it looked like perfectly ordinary white cake to the eye. He sniffed at it and smelled only sugar. Finally, he put it in his mouth. It tasted of licorice.

"Enjoying yourselves?"

Harry promptly choked as Nearly-Headless Nick swooped down behind him, bringing a frigid draft. Wheezing, he turned to find Neville and Hannah nodding at the ghost with too-wide smiles plastered on their faces. What was that spell that Barty had used on him once? _Anap_ -something? Harry wished he had a better memory, and that he could cast spells silently. Wasn't much good to know a spell to stop choking while he was already choking.

Harry smacked his chest with his fist. "It's been… interesting so far," he rasped. "Thanks for inviting us."

Nick beamed and opened his mouth to say something, but his words were swallowed up by the sharp blast of a horn. The ghost's face immediately fell.

"Oh, of course," he muttered as the whole hall went silent.

A massive steed charged through the wall, bearing an armoured rider whose bearded head was tucked neatly under his arm. The hall resounded with the thundering of hooves and applause as another surge of ghostly horsemen joined the first, to the delight of the onlookers. Nick was the only one who wasn't clapping, instead hanging there with a sour look.

Harry stared slack-jawed at the ghost horses. He hadn't read about the horses.

Presently, one was coming right at him, following sedately behind the lead huntsman, who had dismounted and was now looking around with his head held up in the air. He grinned when he caught sight of Nick.

"Nick! How are you? Head still hanging in there?"

"Welcome, Patrick," Nick ground out as the other ghost smacked him on the shoulder with friendly gusto.

"Excuse me," Harry said. Patrick jumped a foot into the air as if spooked, his head flying off to raucous laughter all around. Behind him, Hannah squeaked, looking a little green. Supposing it might be impolite to talk to a decapitated body, Harry waited for Patrick's compatriots to recover his head and stick it back onto his neck.

"Live 'uns," Patrick declared, hands on his ears to keep his head steady as he peered down at them.

"Hello, sir. Excuse me, but I was wondering—where do you get your horses from?" Harry asked.

To his surprise, Patrick suddenly looked very flustered. His bearded face screwed up and he tried to scratch his head, with the result that it tipped off his neck again and he had to scramble to catch it. "Well, we've always had horses. What kind of huntsmen don't have horses?" Regaining some of his bravado, he guffawed and tossed his head in the air. This must have been some kind of signal, because the rest of the Hunt roared into action and went to intercept it like chasers after a dropped quaffle.

Harry frowned. Somehow, he highly doubted that all these men had been decapitated while on horseback. Equally unlikely was the thought that horses could decide to eschew their afterlife and leave an imprint of themselves behind. Harry had never heard of animals leaving ghosts. Muggles, who were human, couldn't even leave ghosts.

"It's time for my speech," Nick said, getting up on stage, but nobody was even looking at him, and the roar of the crowd soon drowned out his sombre words. Everybody was avidly spectating the match of head hockey, which was helpfully commentated by a long-haired knight whose head swung from his fist like a grotesque lantern.

While the ghosts were occupied, Harry sidled up to one of the horses and tried to study it from several angles. It floated about a foot off the ground, and when he got too near, snorted and shook its head.

"What are you doing?" Hannah demanded, hurrying after him and dragging Neville along.

"Trying to figure this out," Harry muttered. "Where do the ghost horses come from? They can't actually be ghosts of horses, can they?"

"Why not?" Hannah asked.

"I've never heard of animal ghosts," Harry said.

Hannah pointed at the horse. "There's a horse ghost. Now you've heard of one."

It was hard to argue with this fact. Harry ran a hand through his hair. "Yes, right, but how are they formed? A horse leads a rubbish life and decides it can't move on, on account of having regrets?"

"Horses are awfully clever," Hannah said, shrugging. She turned to the ghost horse and held out a tentative hand.

"Good idea," said Harry, and poked the horse in its side. He immediately had to grit his teeth as a wave of bone-shattering cold crashed over his hand.

"Hey! What are you lil' ones up to?" barked a gruff voice. Harry's heart skipped a beat and he whirled around to find a massive huntsman shuffling over to them, head tucked under his arm.

"We're just admiring your horse," Harry said honestly, once he managed to move his frozen jaw. Had the ghost just happened to notice them standing there, or had touching the horse actually alerted him somehow?

The man grinned at them with broken teeth. "A fine steed, isn't he? His name's Biscuit. And I am Sir Dolan McLaggen."

The knight bowed, and Harry bowed back clumsily, glad not to have to shake hands. "I'm Harry, and this is Hannah," he said. He gestured to Biscuit. "Where did you get him, sir?"

The same confusion that had struck Sir Patrick earlier bloomed on Sir Dolan's face. "Always had him."

"Always?" Harry repeated. He glanced over to Nick, who was sulking on the stage, droning to himself and no longer even attempting to recapture the audience. "Have you got to have a horse, then, in order to join the Headless Hunt?"

The ghost shrugged. "Always had him, always been in the Hunt, ever since they took my head off." He set his head on his neck and made a slicing motion with his hand, knocking it right back down in demonstration.

"What sorts of things does the Headless Hunt hunt?" Hannah asked, stepping forward. Harry glanced to her in surprise. "Ghost animals?"

Sir Dolan's shoulders shook as he laughed heartily. "Oh no, we don't hunt anything, really. We pass the time with head hockey and head polo. Sometimes even get a bit of head quidditch in there if we're feeling adventurous, though of course we haven't got broomsticks."

"Oh! You're a sports team," Hannah concluded, nodding in understanding.

Nearby, Harry stood frozen, unable to comprehend this piece of information.

"You could say that," Sir Dolan agreed, chortling.

"Are there any women in the Headless Hunt?" Hannah asked.

"Oh nay, no women," said Sir Dolan, shaking his head from where it balanced on his palm. "A headless woman! Now there's a real fright."

"There was Anne Boleyn who was beheaded when they found out she was a witch," Hannah said. "She's probably a ghost, isn't she?"

"I don't know any Anne," mumbled Sir Dolan, but he looked like he would be sweating if he were capable of it.

"Maybe she doesn't fancy having her head used as a quaffle, seeing as she used to be Queen of England," Harry whispered to Neville, eliciting a nervous chuckle. He felt awfully disappointed by the reality of the Headless Hunt. They had to be very old, but they didn't seem that knowledgeable, and they spent all their time playing frivolous games. They couldn't even answer basic questions about themselves!

Glancing back over to Biscuit, Harry shuffled to the side as discreetly as he could and reached his hand backwards, bracing himself as he plunged it into the horse's icy side.

Sir Dolan's head wobbled as he glanced over, but Harry had already withdrawn his hand and slipped it into his robe pocket. He hadn't imagined it. The ghost could tell when somebody touched the horse. The only explanation Harry could think of was that Biscuit was somehow part of Sir Dolan.

An ingenious thought struck him. If Biscuit was part of Sir Dolan, then any magic he did on the horse would apply to the man as well. He could put his theory to the test right now. He didn't want to hurt Sir Dolan, but perhaps he could capture him and let him right back out if it worked.

"You've got that look," Neville said. Harry blinked at him.

"What look?"

"That look where you've got some mad idea you want to try out." Neville demonstrated by drawing his eyebrows together. Harry slapped his hand to his forehead, frowning.

"It's not mad," he protested.

"So you _are_ going to try something?" Neville whispered.

"Don't worry," Harry said, even though he himself was a little worried. He reached into his pocket and fished out a vial. There was some silver sludge inside from when he had tried to save some happy memories in case he had another run in with dementors, but now it just seemed silly to keep it around. How was he supposed to dispose of these?

Opening the vial, he tried pouring some of the liquid out into his cupped hand and rubbing it against his temples. Would that put them back?

"What in Merlin's name are you doing?" Neville asked.

"I'll explain later," Harry said, scrunching up his face. His forehead dried out in an instant. It seemed like the memories had just evaporated. He poured the rest out into his hand and watched it for a moment. Sure enough, the liquid dispersed into silvery mist.

Then he took out his wand and stuck the tip into Biscuit's flank. The horse made no sign of noticing the inanimate object touching it.

" _Prehendo_ ," Harry muttered, moving his wand in rapid anticlockwise circles. When he pulled his wand back, a pearly strand of ghostliness was attached to the tip. He shoved into the vial and repeated the incantation. The effect was instant—the horse and Sir Dolan disappeared.

"What the—?" cried Hannah, looking around wildly.

"Did you just vanish a ghost?" Neville demanded, white as a sheet. Harry checked if anybody else had noticed, but the other ghosts were all still watching the hockey game (which had transformed into more of a free-for-all melee than a proper match).

"Don't be silly," Harry said. He held up the vial, though he hid it behind a cupped hand. "He's in here."

Sure enough, a miniature version of Sir Dolan on his horse could be seen through the crystal—a useful property of spirits was that they could be compressed to arbitrarily small sizes.

"You caught a ghost, then," Neville revised without changing his tone.

"You caught a ghost?" Hannah demanded.

"Shh, not so loud," Harry muttered, waving for her to come closer.

"You can't just do something like this," Hannah said. "Let him out!"

"I was going to," Harry said. "I just wanted to see if it would work."

Hannah smacked her forehead with her palm. "Harry!"

Harry turned the vial upside-down and waited, but the ghost did not slide out. He frowned and tried to poke his finger in, which only resulted in a lance of pain shooting through the digit as it was flash-frozen by concentrated ghostliness. He tried with his wand instead, and the inside of the vial frosted up.

" _Finite incantatem_ ," he said, even though he was pretty sure that the cancellation spell did not apply in this case. The imprisonment spell technically had a one-time effect. Indeed, nothing happened.

"Please don't tell me you don't know how to let him back out," said Hannah.

Harry smiled sheepishly at her. He could smash the vial, he supposed, but what if that didn't work either?

"Let's just get out of here for now," he said, pocketing the vial.

"We can't just leave," Hannah hissed, "That's—kidnapping!"

Harry frowned. "Is it? Can you kidnap a ghost?"

He looked expectantly at Neville, who shrugged and shook his head. "No idea. But I agree with Harry… let's leave before something bad happens." He glanced around nervously again.

"Something bad's already happened," Hannah said, looking at Harry pointedly, but she began making for the exit.

"I'll go straight to the library to figure out how to get him out," Harry promised.

"Do you think the feast is still going?" Neville asked with a tentative frown. Hannah gave him a sympathetic look.

"We should go see. Forget about the library, Harry. It can wait until tomorrow. I mean, I suppose he is already dead… can't be in too much of a rush to be anywhere," she said, sighing. She looked around, frowning. "And I can't believe Vince actually ditched us so completely. He better have saved us all something. I'll forgive him then."

She yawned. Harry covered his mouth preemptively, feeling suddenly quite drained as well now that they were out of the draughty dungeon air.

"Might still be some afters left, if we're lucky," Harry said, fantasising about treacle tart as his stomach growled. He should have eaten more of the tombstone cake while he had had the chance.

As they reached the next landing, all the hairs on the back of Harry's neck stood on end. He wasn't sure what possessed him, but he grabbed Neville and Hannah's arms and dove to the side just as the walls shook with a deafening blast and the ceiling shattered over them. Huge chunks of stone rained down and Harry's mind blanked in desperation—all he could do was keep his grip on his friends and lie there, stunned.

It was over in an instant. Harry blinked and wondered at how he seemed to be unhurt. A burble of laughter tumbled from his mouth and he turned in relief to Neville, who had just crawled shakily to his knees and was staring straight at him with horrified eyes like black pits.

"What?" Harry breathed. Neville raised a trembling hand to indicate something behind him, and Harry felt a painful spasm in his heart as he tried to jerk his head around. Hannah!

But Hannah was sitting right there on his other side with an equally stricken expression on her colourless face. Finally, Harry twisted all the way around to find what his friends were so worried about.

Oh.

A block of stone as high as he was was just there, right behind him. Too close. He followed the slope of its ragged surface down until it ended at his waist. It was splattered with red, and more red was flowing down the cracks between the floor tiles and seeping into his robes. Harry's vision swam suddenly, and his head hit the floor.


	49. Target

When Harry awoke, everything was bluish-white. His eyes snapped open and he took a gasping breath, the impossible sight of the stone and his blood still imprinted in his mind's eye, overlapping the bland canopy of the bed he lay on. His heart was fighting to escape the cage of his chest and he had to clench his fists into the sheets to try to quell his panic. He couldn't feel his legs. He closed his eyes and tried to search for them with his mind, but there was nothing.

He couldn't feel his legs.

Expecting the very worst, Harry tore back the flimsy covers of his hospital bed and stared with burning relief at the result. His legs were right there, pale and skinny poking out of his shorts like limp noodles. Opening his mouth, he tried desperately to exhale the stale air that had ballooned in his chest and was threatening to burst his lungs. He had legs. He still couldn't feel them, that was true, but at least they were _there_.

Right then, Madam Pomfrey came bursting out of her curtained office and made a beeline for his bedside.

"You're awake I see, Mr Potter. You will make a full recovery, but you are not healed yet," she said sternly. "Kindly cover yourself. Skele-gro performs ideally in warm conditions."

Feeling his cheeks flush slightly, Harry lay back down and tugged the covers over himself again.

"How long was I out?" he asked. He squinted at the table at the side of his bed and noticed for the first time that it was adorned with a pile of cards and sweets, as well as a mysteriously lumpy knitted stuffed animal that, upon closer reflection, was probably a ghost. That it was complete and about the size of his head did not bode well for the answer.

"Two days," Madam Pomfrey informed him. Harry screwed up his face as he did the maths.

"It's Monday?" he demanded. "I've missed lessons?"

"I am certain your professors will make an exception, given that you had part of the castle collapse on top of you," Madam Pomfrey said, her tone severe. Her voice softened slightly and she added, "It will take another full night's rest at a minimum for the Skele-gro to finish its work. I would prefer it if you remained here for observation for another twenty-four hours after that."

Harry couldn't stop himself from making a face. He glanced around the hospital wing, but the only other occupied bed was on the far side and had its curtains drawn up, not that he could make out any further details without his glasses anyway

"Neville and Hannah are all right?" he asked. Evidence suggested that they were, but he still wanted a confirmation.

"They are fine. Worried for you, but they weren't hurt at all. Not even a scratch," Madam Pomfrey told him, the look on her blurry face unreadable.

"What happened, anyway? The ceiling blew up—that couldn't have been a coincidence, right? Someone was trying to kill us?" Harry asked, a spark of anger igniting in his chest.

"The headmaster and the staff are investigating the situation," said Madam Pomfrey.

"Can I see him? The headmaster?" said Harry. He hadn't seen Dumbledore at all since their meeting at the start of term. Presumably, the headmaster had been busy searching for information outside the school. Had he returned because of this attack?

"When you are well," said Madam Pomfrey pointedly. Harry sighed and closed his eyes.

Before he knew it, he had dozed off again, and when he next awoke it was broad daylight. A bulky silhouette stood at his bedside. Harry figured it was Vince, but he had to reach out and pat the side table for his glasses to resolve the image, knocking over half his get-well cards and sweets in the process.

There was a weird expression on Vince's face—his eyes were downcast but his lips were almost smiling.

"I'm sorry," Vince whispered. Harry blinked.

"Don't be," he said. "I'm glad, actually, that you weren't there. That's really lucky—otherwise you could've got hurt too."

Vince looked completely unconvinced. Wordlessly, he bent down and picked up a fallen cauldron cake, handing it to Harry.

"You can have it," Harry told him. He was a bit hungry, but the idea of sweets made his stomach roil. He wanted something lighter, like toast or eggs. Was it breakfast time? Harry grabbed his wand from where it had rolled perilously close to the edge of the table and checked, as Vince returned the cake to its compatriots. It was actually almost noon. "Wait, haven't you got defence right now?"

Vince shrugged. Harry paused, feeling conflicted about whether to chide him for visiting—it was nice of him, but lessons were important!

Madam Pomfrey came out from her office just then and stalked over. "Visiting hours haven't started yet," she said, making a shooing motion. "Out. Out! My patient needs rest."

Vince let himself be pushed out of the hospital wing without too much resistance. Harry waved after him half-heartedly, a little perplexed by his strange behaviour.

Madam Pomfrey wasn't to get her wish, however, because several minutes later, Professor Dumbledore arrived in the hospital wing. She gave him a stern look, told him, "Ten minutes," and retreated back to her office. Smiling, Dumbledore ambled over and helped himself to a box of Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans from Harry's bedside table.

"Hello Harry. How are you feeling?" he asked. "Jelly bean?"

Harry waved away the offered box. "I'm fine, thanks, sir. Madam Pomfrey is really amazing."

"That she is," Professor Dumbledore agreed. "Would now be a good time to talk, then?"

"Yes, sir. Honestly, it's pretty boring being here by myself," Harry said.

Dumbledore beamed and drew up a floral-patterned armchair out of thin air, settling himself comfortably. "Very good. I hope I prove to be interesting company, then. First, though I have spoken with Ms Abbott and Mr Longbottom already, I would like to hear your account of what happened the evening of the thirty-first."

"There's not really much to tell," Harry said, glancing down at his bedspread. "We were walking back from Sir Nicholas's deathday party. When we were coming out of the dungeons, I had a bad feeling so I just grabbed Hannah and Neville and pulled us all to the side. That's when the ceiling came down."

Just then, Harry remembered Sir Dolan. Was he still trapped in the vial? Had Hannah perhaps figured out how to release him? He glanced over to the robes that had been folded neatly at the foot of his bed.

"While I commend you for leaping to protect your friends, might I suggest saving some care for yourself in the future?" said Professor Dumbledore.

Harry blinked bemusedly at him. "What do you mean, sir? I just tried to get out of the way. Only it didn't work, clearly."

"Your luck ran thin, and no wonder, when it was stretched over three people," said Professor Dumbledore. Though his words were those of admonishment, he almost sounded proud. Harry simply found them bewildering.

"Is that how luck works?" he said.

"Quite," said Dumbledore. "Now, can you elaborate on the 'bad feeling' that you experienced before the collapse?"

Harry shrugged. "I'm not sure if I can explain it. Maybe I felt a tremor or something? I didn't see anybody, but it was an attack, right, sir? Did you find out who did it?"

Dumbledore shook his head, his lips in a grim line. "I was hoping that you had seen or heard something. There were no other witnesses. No portraits hang in that corner, and the Baron, who usually patrols that area of the castle, was, of course, otherwise occupied that evening."

"So whoever it was planned it. Well, I suppose that's obvious. But how did they know we were going to be there? I didn't tell anybody else that I was going to the party instead of the feast." Harry frowned. "Hannah probably told her friends, though. So it could've been anybody. I didn't hear anyone say a spell or anything. Do you know what spell they used?"

"The excavation curse. It was delayed, likely with a timing charm, but not for more than a minute. While they are not mentioned in lessons until sixth year, neither spell is exceptionally difficult to perform, and so we are left with few hints. I have already followed up with every student above third year who was not present at the feast that evening. None of them seems remotely deserving of suspicion," Dumbledore said. "The only professor who was absent was Professor Trelawney, who was not seen leaving the North Tower all evening."

"What if the person used a time turner?" Harry asked. He did not like this suggestion himself—it opened up the potential culprits to everybody, again, which did not help.

Dumbledore looked surprised, but his face smoothed out momentarily. "Access to time turners is extremely restricted," he said.

"Don't all the professors have them?" Harry asked.

"Professors teaching more than thirty hours of lessons each week are normally eligible to apply for access. However, in light of recent events, I have instated the requirement of a minimum of five years employment at Hogwarts," Dumbledore said, regarding Harry meaningfully.

That meant that Lockhart, who was under Voldemort's control, did not have a time turner of his own, and so had an alibi. Harry wondered if he should be suspecting the Dark Lord for the attempted murder at all. He didn't have anybody else plausible to suspect, but at the same time, it made no practical sense for Voldemort to try to kill him now, not least because Harry would be dead—or at least effectively dead—had Voldemort done nothing to interfere at the beginning of term when he had been swarmed by dementors.

Lockhart wasn't the only person Voldemort was controlling, Harry remembered suddenly. There was Draco, too.

"Sir, you said third year and above, right? What about first and second years?" Harry asked.

"Luckily, all the first years were accounted for," Professor Dumbledore said. "The same cannot be said of the second years. None of the second year Slytherins attended the feast. They claim to have been enjoying a private celebration in their common room, catered by Mr Malfoy's family house elf."

Harry frowned. "And you believe them, sir?"

"I do believe that it is likely that such a celebration took place," said Dumbledore. "Naturally, there is no external party who can confirm which students were present for its entire duration."

The Slytherin common room was somewhere in the dungeons. Hypothetically, somebody could have slipped out, cast the spell to bring down the ceiling, and then slipped back into the private party within a matter of minutes. That somebody might have been under the imperius curse, and thus been capable of more precision and discretion than the average second year student. That somebody might have been named Draco Malfoy, and hosted a special Halloween party for the express purpose of obscuring his actions that evening.

Harry's frown deepened. He couldn't just come out and say it, however much the desire to do so burned within him. All he had was circumstantial evidence. Dumbledore, he understood, was in the same boat.

"I see," he finally said. There was also a huge problem that he still could not make sense of. "Sir… do you think that Voldemort was behind this attack?"

"From what I know, it is likely that he issued the order for your death, but left the particulars unspecified. For all that he covets being in control, Voldemort has always allowed his followers surprising leeway in carrying out his commands," Dumbledore said.

Harry did not find this surprising. There was something simultaneously intense and relaxed about Voldemort, in that he only cared about certain things and was completely indifferent about everything else. He didn't think the way other people did. Perhaps, in Voldemort's head, their agreement only extended to not personally killing him. Harry supposed he couldn't complain. Two were playing that game—he was colluding with Dumbledore, after all. But this did not explain why Voldemort had saved his life in the forest.

Harry opened his mouth to bring it up, but nothing came out. Could he retroactively get in trouble for having gone into the Forbidden Forest? So what if he could? This was a matter of life and death, much more important than house points or detention. Still, something held him back from saying anything. Was it that he didn't trust Dumbledore?

That was true, certainly, but he wasn't sure why it should have any bearing on the matter. He trusted that Dumbledore was Voldemort's enemy—wasn't that enough?

"A knut for your thoughts?" asked Dumbledore, and Harry realised that he had been silent for some time now. His mind went blank as he tried to search for something to say.

Finally, he mumbled, "Something just doesn't seem to add up. Voldemort could have killed me before. Over the summer. He had the opportunity. Why would he wait until I was at Hogwarts?"

And why wait so long?

Dumbledore tilted his head, and the morning light glinted momentarily off his glasses, obscuring his eyes.

"I see," he said grimly.

"What? Sir? Did you figure something out?" Harry asked.

"Perhaps you are correct in your insistence that Voldemort does not want you dead," Dumbledore said.

Harry simply gaped, now entirely lost. How could an attempt at murder be construed as evidence of a lack of murderous intent?

"Have you had the chance to speak with Professor Trelawney?" Dumbledore asked.

Harry blinked. "Yes, sir. Did you want to talk about Voldemort's past now?"

"No; I think this is neither the time nor the place. I will arrange a meeting at a later date. I merely wish to know what Professor Trelawney had to say about your inner eye," said Dumbledore.

"I can do divination, if that's what you mean, sir," Harry said.

Dumbledore nodded. "Very good. Perhaps you can tell me what you think of the prophecy, then?"

Harry's mouth suddenly went dry. He couldn't read anything besides honest interest in Dumbledore's lined face. Closing his eyes for a moment, he held his breath to calm himself. It was just like inventing an answer for Professor Snape when one hadn't done the reading. Only, the consequences were far worse than getting sneered at and losing house points.

He had to lean heavily on what he did know, and fish for information. Standard practice. "Which part?" he asked, before he could properly think it through.

Then he froze in even more horror. No! He didn't want to know _which part—_ what could have possibly possessed him to ask such a foolhardy question?

"Either must die at the hand of the other," said Dumbledore, and Harry's heart threatened to beat out of his chest. Black spots appeared in his vision. He had to force himself to take a shallow breath. Deal with the situation now; panic later.

He already knew that part, anyway, even if it hadn't been in those exact words. "Well, it's pretty straightforward, isn't it?" he said, and when Dumbledore regarded him with encouraging neutrality, continued, "We're fated to fight to the death. The Dark Lord and I."

"To fight," Dumbledore repeated. "You understand it as a direct duel?"

Dumbledore's tone had taken on a familiar, teacher-like quality that Harry was intimately familiar with. He immediately abandoned his position and searched for another answer. "Well, I suppose it could be that one of us sneaks up on the other and murders him," Harry said, though he could only imagine that scenario going one way. Still, that interpretation, though logically plausible, felt hollow to him.

"I apologise, Harry, I did not mean to question your understanding as such. I have not personally made a study of the art of divination, so I only wished to clarify—you envision a duel?" Dumbledore asked.

Harry nodded, thinking back to the signs and images he had seen while divining with Petri's aid. With Dumbledore's confession that he was not talented in divination, Harry felt more confident in his understanding. "Yes, sir, exactly."

Another illicitly learned fragment of the prophecy came to him, seared into his mind like a brand. Equals, Dumbledore had mentioned once. A duel of equals, to the death.

"Then, correct me if I am wrong, but you would not consider any indirect assassination attempt as resembling the conditions foretold in the prophecy?" Dumbledore pressed, and finally Harry saw where he was going with this line of questioning.

"You think that Voldemort isn't… sincerely trying to kill me?" Harry asked. There was a problem with that hypothesis, which Dumbledore wasn't privy to, namely that Voldemort didn't actually know this line of the prophecy. Then again, Harry had discovered that part more or less on his own, and it stood to reason that the Dark Lord had some idea of the general concept as well. A bigger problem was that it still did not make sense. "Why on earth would he bother at all, then?"

"I do not pretend to understand Voldemort perfectly, but I find that asking what he has to gain from a particular action tends to reliably lead one back to his reason for acting," Dumbledore said. He peered at Harry over the rims of his spectacles. "What do you think, Harry? What does Voldemort have to gain from making it appear as if your life were in danger?"

Dumbledore's questions were a lot harder than any other professor's questions, Harry reflected glumly, as no ready answer came to mind.

"I don't know, sir," he finally said.

"I believe that you saw him employ this exact strategy last term, and unfortunately, to great effect," Dumbledore said.

When had Dumbledore been in a position to know what Harry had seen the Dark Lord do? They had only interacted for the duration of an extremely tense walk across Hogwarts' grounds. But of course—how had Voldemort got the philospher's stone from Dumbledore?

"He threatened me," Harry breathed in realisation. "He threatened me to get you, sir, to do what he wanted."

Dumbledore nodded. "I do not believe I overestimate myself when I say that I am one of Lord Voldemort's most despised enemies. Almost assuredly, one of his pressing aims is to bring about my demise."

"What will you do then, sir?" Harry asked.

Dumbledore smiled and winked conspiratorially. "Naturally, I will do exactly as he expects and remain at Hogwarts for the time being."

"You're just going along with him?" Harry murmured in bewilderment.

"It is usually unwise to tip one's hand before one has all the cards," Dumbledore said. He stood up and pushed his chair back, where it promptly vanished. "Now, I believe my ten minutes are up. Rest well, Harry."

"Thank you, sir," Harry said, finding himself disappointed by the end of their conversation as Dumbledore wandered out of the hospital wing. When Madam Pomfrey did not exit her office immediately, he pushed the covers aside and experimentally swung his now-healed legs of the edge. Daringly, he put some weight on his feet, found that they felt perfectly normal, and stood up.

Of course, that was when Madam Pomfrey emerged and caught him red-handed.

"Back to bed with you," she admonished, waving her arms, and Harry slumped backwards, groaning as his strangely sore tail bone met the springy mattress.

When she left him again after he had reassured her that he would not try to escape, he reached over to the bedside table and grabbed the stack of correspondence next to the sweets. First there was a generic get-well card from his housemates—even some people he didn't really know, second and third years perhaps, had signed it. Next was a note from Hannah, decorated with animated doodles of animals and flowers in coloured ink:

_Hi Harry,_

_I hope you wake up soon. I know, obviously you can't read this unless you're awake, so it's silly._

_The headmaster said we were very lucky and it was thanks to your quick reaction that we didn't get hurt at all. Not that I'm not glad not to have been squished by the ceiling, but I feel really bad about it. For a second, I thought you were going to die. There was so much blood. Sorry. That's depressing but_ _ please save yourself next time _ .

_Get better._

_-Hannah_

_PS: I'm making you a ghost doll to remind you how you almost kicked the bucket. Also, not to be a nag, but don't forget about Sir Dolan. We looked in the library some but didn't find anything. Nev even asked Hermione Granger for help. Just_ _ where _ _did you learn how to catch a ghost?_

Harry put down the letter and grabbed the ghost doll, examining it in more detail. It had green X's for eyes and a red lightning-bolt on its forehead. And Hannah called _him_ morbid.

Neville had left a note too, though it was much shorter:

_Get well soon, Harry. I got you some flowers to brighten up the place, since Madam Pomfrey said you might have to stay in the infirmary awhile even after you wake up. I hope that's not weird. I also got you some chocolate. It's the good stuff from Honeydukes._

_-Neville_

Harry smiled to himself as he took a moment to admire Neville's flowers, which had been placed into a large potion beaker. He didn't recognise any of them from Aunt Petunia's garden—their voluminous centres pulsed with ethereal luminescence, surrounded by colourful petals which swayed softly, though there was no breeze, so he supposed they must be a magical variety. Against the plain stone backdrop, they were certainly eye-catching and lively.

The last letter in Harry's stack was from Petri. Harry frowned as he broke the thin wax seal and unfolded the parchment, uncertain what to expect.

_Dear Harry,_

_Dumbledore informed me that you almost died under his watch. How ironic. He also mentioned that you were gravely injured because you were busy worrying about others rather than yourself. Inexplicably, he seemed to consider this a good thing. It isn't. You must train yourself to focus your magic inwards during a panic, or you may well actually die next time from an avoidable cause. I do not know exactly how to advise you, as the majority of wizards manage this_ _instinctively_ _. All I can suggest is that you take note of the value of your life. You are worth more than most wizards by your ability alone, and certainly more than any others your age. I have invested everything into you because I understand your potential._

_Stay safe._

_Yours,_

_JP_

Harry reread the letter a few times, bemused. That was one way to tell him to get more self-worth, he supposed. He was still flummoxed about how his getting hurt had somehow been _his fault,_ as Dumbledore had alleged and Petri confirmed. It was true, he supposed, that he had taken a moment to grab Hannah and Neville instead of just jumping out of the way on his own. But how was he supposed to have acted any differently?

He read the letter again. Petri didn't know, either, because apparently Harry was a special sort of daft. Sighing, he tossed the letter aside and sunk into the covers. He should write Petri back and ask about how to release a ghost from imprisonment, ideally before the Headless Hunt realised exactly who had been responsible for Sir Dolan's disappearance, if they hadn't yet.

Then again, did he really have anything to fear? The Headless Hunt had so far completely failed to live up to their reputation. More credible was the threat that Hannah would be cross with him if he tried to keep the ghost.

Groaning, he crawled forward and reached for his robes, looking for a quill and parchment. He took out Sir Dolan too and squinted at the chilly vial. The ghost and his horse were still squashed inside, but his expression was too small to make out. He didn't look too murderous, so Harry shrugged and tucked him back into his pocket.

"Dear Uncle Jochen," Harry wrote, chewing on the end of the feather. He didn't know how to respond to what Petri had written, so finally elected to just ignore it entirely. "I hope you can help me with a problem I got myself into…"

When he had written the letter, Harry set it aside for later and slumped back into his bed. There had been no word of homework or assignments, and he doubted he could get away with practising magic in the hospital wing, so he resigned himself to a boring stay.

Nobody came to visit—unsurprising, as the probability that Vince had communicated with anybody about his being awake was nonexistent. Harry slept fitfully through the day and night, waking up periodically to disquieting nightmares of having his limbs chopped off.

He practically skipped down to breakfast on Wednesday morning, finally cleared to leave by a rather pensive Madam Pomfrey. She had assured him that his sweets and get-well cards would be transferred to his dormitory, so he had shrugged on his robes, delighted to finally be out of the scratchy hospital gown, and departed unencumbered.

His smile fell from his face as he stepped into the Great Hall. There was an almost tangible tension in the air, and every face he could see looked subdued, even downcast. The teachers' mouths were all drawn into severe lines.

"Harry! It's good to see you again. Are you okay? We heard about what happened," Lisa whispered as Harry slipped into the open space Terry had made. He nodded.

"I'm fine now. Thanks for the get-well cards and sweets. Did something happen? Something else, I mean," he asked.

"You haven't heard?" Terry murmured. Harry felt a distinct disquiet at how uncharacteristically serious he looked.

"I've been unconscious for days," Harry pointed out.

Terry winced. "Right. Well, yesterday night, someone fell off the astronomy tower."

Harry didn't remember seeing anybody new in the hospital wing. With how sombre the mood was, it wasn't difficult to draw the proper conclusion. Ice formed in his gut. "They didn't make it?"

Jerky nods around the table. Harry blinked, taking in the news.

"Who was it?" he asked.

"Weasley," said Terry. "The Gryffindor prefect."

Percy Weasley? Harry's gaze immediately jerked to the Gryffindor table. Now that he was searching, he noted the conspicuous lack of red hair. There were no Weasleys to be found.

"You said fell," Harry said, mind racing. "So it was an accident?"

Awkward, closed up faces greeted him. Finally, Lisa scowled and slammed both of her elbows into the table, slouching aggressively.

"They aren't saying it, but it wasn't an accident. He jumped," she said.

"Wait, why do you think that?" Harry murmured, thrown. "Couldn't he have been pushed?" He couldn't help drawing parallels to the attack on his own person.

"A fall from that height isn't normally fatal," Terry explained. "Quidditch players have worse falls all the time. For your magic not to protect you… you must have lost the will to live. That's the only explanation, isn't it?"

Though he was whispering, his voice gained a harsh quality at the end, as if he wanted to yell.

Harry blinked, struggling to comprehend why Terry seemed angry. It was understandable that everybody was sad—death was supposed to be sad, right? But angry?

"Did you know him well?" Harry finally asked. Terry's face blanked in bemusement.

"No. Does that matter?" he muttered, looking away. "It's just awful, isn't it? He was pure-blood, a prefect, and they're saying he got twelve OWLs. _Twelve_. Why would someone like that…"

"Maybe it was just too much stress," said Mandy. "Twelve OWLs is a lot."

"But he'd got them already!" Terry cried, perhaps a little too loudly. Further down the table somebody stood up very suddenly and stalked out of the hall, head bowed. Harry stared after them. It was Penelope.

"We shouldn't… gossip about it," said Sue, pursing her lips in disapproval.

Terry drew himself up defensively. "Harry didn't know. I was just getting him up to speed."

From across the table, Morag leaned over with a conspiratorial mien. "Penelope's just left anyway. I heard they were seeing each other in secret, but that they recently broke up. You don't think…"

"Morag!" Sue squeaked, reaching out and pushing her back into her seat. "Don't say things like that."

But Morag may have been right. Penelope did not show up to charms club that week. She hadn't cancelled or moved it either, so everybody still gathered up on the astronomy tower rooftop on Sunday afternoon. Though it made no sense logically, there was an air of danger and foreboding around the crenellations, and nobody strayed too close to the edge.

Ginny wasn't there either. None of the Weasleys had returned to school yet.

A frustrated Gemma tried to take the opportunity to show everybody the reductor curse, but was foiled by Gabriel, who demonstrated the shield charm instead.

The shield charm would probably have been useful to know when the ceiling had come down. It could block both spells and solid objects. There had been only a split second in which he could have done anything, though. That wasn't enough time to pull up a half-remembered incantation and wand movement. He had to be able to cast it instinctively, even in his sleep.

Perhaps there was merit in practising spells, after all.

"I still can't get it," Neville mumbled, staring dejectedly into the distance. As usual, Harry had noticed nothing wrong with his wand movement or pronunciation. His spell just didn't work. Harry felt especially bad for managing a translucent bubble on his third try. Still, it wasn't an easy spell—none of the first years had got any reaction, and even the third years seemed to be struggling.

"Hey Nev, have you ever wondered if it's your wand that's the problem?" Hannah said out of the blue. Neville paused in his latest unsuccessful attempt and stared up at her. She held up her hands defensively. "I've been thinking, ever since you said that it's your dad's wand. What if it didn't choose you?"

"But it's my dad's wand," Neville whispered. "Maybe you're right. What if it didn't choose me, because it doesn't think I'll ever be worthy of it like him?"

"No! That's not what I meant," Hannah cried hastily. Heads turned, and she flushed, but continued, at a lower volume, "What if you just tried with a different wand?"

"How would I do that?" Neville asked, eyeing her wand, and a sheepish look passed over Hannah's face as she slipped her hand behind her back.

Though it sort of felt like he was about to part with a limb, Harry held his own wand out. "Trade you," he said with a wry smile.

"Oh, um, are you sure, Harry?" Neville stammered. "Wands are really personal, so I wouldn't want to…"

"It's fine. My wand's supposed to be good for charms, anyway. Maybe I've got an unfair advantage," Harry said. Neville's hand closed around the handle, and he passed his own wand to Harry.

It sort of _was_ awkward holding somebody else's wand, Harry noticed, tensing up with the irrational worry that he might somehow damage it. Neville looked just as uncomfortable. Harry took a breath and got a grip on himself and Neville's wand.

" _Lumos_ ," he said. A weak light sputtered out of the end, dying almost immediately. He flushed despite himself.

Neville took a deep breath and tried the lighting charm as well. Harry's wand tip lit up with a steady glow.

Harry stared down at it, feeling short of breath like his chest had been struck with a sudden blow. This whole time, had his wand just been abnormally easy to use? Well, that didn't mean anything about how good he was at magic, did it? It wasn't his problem that other peoples' wands were faulty.

"I suppose you were right," Harry told Hannah.

"What does this mean?" Neville whispered, looking between Harry's wand and his with wide eyes.

"Maybe you're secretly Merlin," Harry said. Neville produced a stuttering laugh. "Try another spell."

" _Protego!_ " Neville shouted, sketching a perfect circle. At once, a shimmering disc bloomed from the wand and stretched in front of him.

"Let me try that," Hannah said, snatching Harry's wand out of Neville's loose grip while he was busy gaping.

" _Wingardium leviosa!_ " She swished and flicked at her rucksack. It twitched reluctantly. "I don't think your wand likes me."

"Can I have a go?" Vince asked. Hannah handed him the wand, but he wasn't able to get any reaction from it at all.

"Give it here," Harry grumbled, passing Neville's wand back to him as well. Neville stared at it with dismay.

"Maybe you should get yourself a new wand," Hannah told him.

Neville's head whipped up in horror. "I can't. It's my dad's wand. What would Gran say if I told her I didn't want to use my dad's wand?"

"Maybe you can use my wand, and I can get a new one, and you don't tell your Gran," Harry said, wondering if he might be able to get an even better wand, since his hadn't been selected by any special process. His friends turned to stare at him with identical mystified looks. "What?"

"I couldn't do that," Neville finally said. "It's your wand."

"It didn't choose me or anything," Harry muttered. "Maybe I could find another at Ollivander's."

"Where'd you get it, then?" Hannah asked. "Is it an ancestor's wand too?"

Harry shook his head. "No. I'm not sure whose wand it was before, actually, but my uncle gave it to me." In fact, it had never occurred to him that his wand might have been used by another wizard before, but it was more than likely. Why would Petri just have a collection of new wands lying around, after all?

Why did he have a collection of wands in the first place? There was no answer to that, either.

"So it probably is from someone related to you," Hannah said. Harry shrugged.

"Doesn't seem like being related is what matters," he said, but regretted it when Neville's glum expression deepened. Trying to make up for it, he forged onwards: "All our wands are made from different materials, right? They're unique. So it would make sense that some people are better suited to certain woods or cores. There's no reason why your family members' wands should work for you."

"What about genes?" Hannah pointed out.

"What?" said Neville, his expression blank.

"Genes… you know," she said again, blinking rapidly. "They're these… things that we all have, like instructions for our bodies. You get them from your parents."

Harry thought he vaguely remembered hearing about genes from primary school and, strangely enough, Aunt Marge.

"What's that got to do with wands?" Neville asked.

"She means blood," Vince said, to everybody's surprise. He frowned at them. "Well, don't you? You've got the same blood as your family, so if your blood runs true, you should be good at the same things and favour the same sorts of wands. That's how it is with pure-bloods, anyway."

He looked expectantly to Neville, who gave a hesitant nod.

Harry wanted to protest that blood couldn't be everything, but he couldn't think of any good evidence to bring up. His parents were dead, so it wasn't like he knew either way whether he was anything like them. Actually, he knew his father had been in Gryffindor, so there was at least one way in which Harry was demonstrably unlike him.

He thought about writing to Petri about the matter of his wand, but he could already guess at the response. What was the point of getting a new wand when he had a perfectly serviceable one already? Besides, he was still waiting for a reply to his last letter.

That reminded him—"Hey, Vince," he said, "I heard the Slytherins had a private party on Halloween."

"What? You dropped us for a private party?" Hannah demanded immediately, twisting around. Vince shrank back, holding up his meaty hands.

"Sorry guys, but it was Draco's party. I couldn't just say no to Draco for some ghosts," he said.

Hannah rolled her eyes. "Why not? And it wasn't for some ghosts, it was for Harry. And us. You could've at least told us."

"It's okay, I'm not mad that you went to Draco's party instead. I'm positive it was more fun than the deathday party," Harry said hurriedly before Hannah could derail the conversation further. If anything, Vince looked guiltier. Harry wasn't sure what he had done wrong, so he pressed on. "Were you with Draco the whole time? Did you—did he do anything strange?"

Vince blinked at him. "Strange like how?"

"Did he leave the common room at all?" Harry asked.

"No, I don't think so," said Vince, furrowing his brows.

"What are you talking about?" said Hannah, eyebrows raised. "Harry, you don't think Malfoy attacked us? That's ridiculous."

"Is it?" Harry muttered. "Dumbledore told me he asked all the upper years already and he doesn't think it could be any of them. All the second year Slytherins were at Draco's party, which was in the dungeons somewhere."

Hannah looked uncertain. "The Headmaster told you that?"

Out of the corner of his eye, Harry saw sweat beading on Vince's brow.

"Sorry, Vince, I didn't mean to accuse your friends. Draco's…" Harry hesitated at calling the arrogant boy a friend, "on friendly terms with me too. It's just that somebody must be behind the attack, and they haven't caught them yet. Maybe I'm just grasping at straws. You didn't notice anyone leaving the party? Around eight?"

Vince shook his head, his shoulders hunched with tension. Harry sighed.

"All right. Sorry for bringing it up."

"It's okay," Vince mumbled, though he did not relax.

"I'm a bit worried too, to be honest," Hannah said, shuddering. "Somebody was really trying to hurt us. Professor Dumbledore said we'd be safe, but how does he know that, if he hasn't caught the culprit?"

Harry recalled something that Dumbledore had said during their conversation: "The ghosts and the portraits. They watch the castle, I think, and report on things. So normally nobody would be able to get away with an attack like that. Only, all the ghosts were busy on Halloween."

"It might have just been a prank gone wrong," Neville said.

"A prank? We could've died!" Hannah protested. "You saw what happened to Harry." She shot him an apologetic look.

Neville winced. "It's why I hate pranks. They're awful, even the supposedly nice ones, and they're never really funny. Maybe someone just wanted to scare us, but it went too far."

Harry didn't think so. Even Professor Dumbledore had acknowledged it as a serious attack and suspected Voldemort. But of course, Neville didn't know that, so to him, there seemed to have been no motive. Harry shrugged.

"We can't know unless they catch who did it. It's already been a few days, though. They'll probably get away with it," he said. That was how it was. There were laws and rules, but people always got away with breaking them when it counted. He ought not to try to investigate, anyway. So what if Draco under the imperius curse had been responsible? There was nothing he could do. He clenched his fists.

"You really think so?" Hannah murmured.

"Yeah," Harry said. "We'll just have to be more careful from now on. The shield charm will be useful, too."

Neville sighed deeply. "Fat lot of good it'll do if I can't cast it."

"But you can cast it," Harry said. "You did it with my wand, so that proves it, right? You just have to figure it out with yours."

Neville did not look too enthused by this prospect. Even Harry felt some amount of defeat when the hour passed and he had still accomplished nothing more than a translucent flicker.

"Harry," said Hannah in his ear as they descended the cramped spiral staircase, "did you tell Professor Dumbledore about Sir Dolan?"

Harry paused and Hannah almost ran right into him. "No. I didn't think of that. But I wrote my uncle. He'll probably know what to do." He wasn't sure how Dumbledore would react to the news that he had bottled a ghost. On the one hand, it was dark magic. On the other hand, Harry thought that as far as dark magic went, it really wasn't that questionable.

"Did he teach you how to catch ghosts, then?" Hannah asked. Harry winced.

"Sort of. Only the theory, though."

"I don't understand why it wasn't in any library books," Hannah muttered. "Where did he learn it from? And why? What's the point?"

"Dunno," Harry lied. "I just thought it would be interesting to try it."

Hannah sighed. "You're really thick sometimes for a Ravenclaw."

Petri's reply arrived the next day at breakfast. Harry knew as soon as he saw the first line that he was in for disappointment:

_Dear Harry,_

_Why on earth would you want to release a headless ghost? Do you know how rare and useful of a resource you have seemingly acquired by accident? Of course you do not. I would enlighten you, but a letter is hardly the place to do so._

_It suffices to say that I shall not advise you on how to reverse the imprisonment charm. Indeed, one of the features of the charm is that it should be difficult to break by ordinary means. Bring your prize home. One of us will be able to make proper use of it in any case._

_I hope you are not neglecting your studies._

_Yours,_

_JP_

Appalled, Harry dropped the letter.

"Bad news?" asked Lisa. Harry shrugged and rolled his eyes.

"Not really, just my uncle being himself. 'I hope you are not neglecting your studies,'" he quoted. That wasn't the part he was annoyed about, but it was the only part he wanted to read aloud. Lisa snorted.

"Ravenclaw family too, huh?" she said. "I feel your pain."

Harry paused to consider these words. He had never thought about what house Petri would have been in, had he gone to Hogwarts. Perhaps Lisa was right. Petri wasn't brave or loyal, and he was quite straightforward. His only redeeming quality was his magical expertise, and even that verged on pedantry.

"Yeah," Harry agreed, but he was disturbed by the similarity between him and Petri that this observation implied. Was his sorting a reflection of how Petri had rubbed off on him? Some influence was unavoidable, it was true, but there was no telling where it ended. Could he become evil without realising it?

Surely not. Harry stirred his porridge and sucked on the spoon. There was nothing wrong with being curious about magic. He had always been a curious person—that had nothing to do with Petri. He nodded to himself. They were nothing alike.


	50. Nargle

People seemed to have forgotten about Percy’s suicide by mid-November. The four remaining Weasleys had returned to school, and the twins had even resumed pranking activities. Spirits and tension were at an all time high with the big Ravenclaw-Gryffindor quidditch match on the horizon.

Only Penelope had not recovered. She had skipped two charms clubs meetings before Gemma had finally ordered Cho and Marietta to drag her out of the dormitory for her own good. Though Penelope refused to go up the astronomy tower, they managed to get her as far as the glass rotunda. The choir normally practised in that room, but it hadn’t taken much for Gemma to convince Professor Flitwick to cede the space for an afternoon.

Penelope looked awful. There were deep purple shadows under her swollen eyes, like bruises, and her hair was a tangled mess that had been pinned up in a haphazard pile. Harry had seen vampires, hags, and literal corpses that looked better.

“Do you think somebody’s cursed her?” Harry whispered to Vince, unable to reconcile the present image with the serious, put-together prefect he had known.

“Harry!” Hannah hissed from beside him.

“I’m serious,” he said. He couldn’t help thinking of Lockhart’s erratic actions under his own imperius curse. Another student might well be targeting Penelope. Even worse, what if the Dark Lord had ordered Lockhart to put as many people under the imperius curse as possible? Harry wasn’t sure if there was a hard limit to the number of people one could curse at once. “Drastic behaviour changes could be a sign of mind-control magic.”

“Or a sign of grief. You know, because your boyfriend died,” Hannah muttered.

On her other side, Ginny gasped and jumped to her feet, running out of the room. Hannah immediately covered her mouth.

“I shouldn’t have said that. Merlin. I wasn’t thinking,” she moaned.

“It’s weird,” Harry said, unconvinced. Nothing like this had happened to Annette after Nalrod’s death, and hadn’t Nalrod been something like a boyfriend? Harry did not see the point of moping. It couldn’t bring Percy back. Throwing oneself into studying necromancy would have been a more logical choice.

Necromancy—that was it! Maybe he could find out why Percy had done it. Wasn’t that what everybody had been wondering? And what if it hadn’t been suicide, after all?

Only, he needed something of Percy’s. Or perhaps one of Percy’s relatives would do. Ginny had inconveniently just left, but Harry figured he could sit next to Ron in lessons and try to snag some dropped hairs. Blood would probably be better, but he couldn’t imagine how he was supposed to surreptitiously get somebody’s blood.

“We’re all worried about you, Penny,” Gemma told Penelope in a low voice, touching her shoulder gently. Penelope stiffened and looked away.

“I know,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologise,” Gemma hissed. “Just show up and don’t dwell on the past.”

“Right,” said Penelope tonelessly. More loudly, she asked, “So, what charm are we doing today?”

“You’re the president—what did people vote on?” Gemma asked. Penelope reached into her robe pocket and rummaged around for a bit, before coming up empty-handed.

“I haven’t got the membership sheet on me,” she said, slumping, as if she didn’t even have the energy to be properly sheepish.

“Let’s do a quick vote right here,” Gabriel said, standing up. “What were everybody’s suggestions?”

Harry glanced around. There really weren’t too many club members present—none of the first years had shown up, other than Ginny, who had run off, and Cassius was missing too, probably because of quidditch practice. Vicky Frobisher raised her hand.

“Permanent sticking charm,” she said.

“All right, permanent sticking charm. Anybody else?” Gabriel asked. Nobody else raised their hand. “Permanent sticking charm it is, then. I don’t actually know it, though.”

He scratched his head and turned to Penelope, who nodded.

“I know it. Give me some parchment,” she said. Taking the sheet that Gabriel handed her, she folded it and placed it on the glass table. “ _Necto durabilis._ ” Her wand moved in an anticlockwise inward spiral as she tapped the pachment.

Nothing seemed to happen, and when she touched the parchment, it flopped open.

“Oh,” she said, staring at it listlessly. “Well, that’s the incantation and wand movement.” She pocketed her wand and shuffled slowly over to one of the benches along the wall, where she sat down and fixed her eyes on the ground.

“Is this spell actually permanent?” Harry muttered as he extracted some old homework fragments from his pocket. It was probably fine to sacrifice those.

“Don’t think so,” said Neville. “It’s permanent, as in, it won’t come off on accident. But I think you can still cancel it if you try hard enough.”

“Only if you try really hard,” said Hannah. “My dad used that charm on some photos in our old place, and when we moved he had to hire an enchanter to get them off without breaking the wall. Apparently it gets stronger the longer you leave it on.”

“Imagine if you used it to stick somebody’s shoes to the ground,” Harry mused. That seemed like a good way to stall a pursuer.

“That’d be a nasty prank,” Hannah said. “But how would you get close enough? I think your wand has to actually touch the thing you’re sticking.”

“Oh.” Harry discovered that Hannah was right. At least, he couldn’t get the spell to work otherwise.

He paused to watch Hannah as she made creative use of the spell to stack curls of parchment into florets.

“So what do you lot want for Christmas?” she asked as she stacked her completed units into a flower ball.

Was it that time of year again already? Harry frowned. “Nothing, really,” he said.

“Chocolate,” said Vince.

A melancholy look passed over Neville’s face. “Hannah, could you teach me how to make that?” he asked, gesturing to her parchment creation.

“Sure,” she said. “But you have to tell me what you want. You too, Harry. ‘Nothing’ isn’t an acceptable answer.”

He’d be happy to just be alive come Christmas, Harry thought. He might be immune to dying from indirect attacks, but once he left Hogwarts, all bets were off. Voldemort’s mercy—or rather, his unknown use for Harry, was the only thing standing between him and the grave.

Well, there was his horcrux, he remembered. But was it truly any good? Even if it was used to revive him, would the resulting person still be the original him? Dumbledore, at least, didn’t seem to think so.

“You can get me whatever you want,” Harry told Hannah. When she levelled an unimpressed glare at him, he frowned and said, “How about a hat? To go with the scarf you made me last year?”

Her expression immediately brightened. “Of course!”

“You can make me one article of clothing every year. One glove each in third and fourth year, one sock for fifth and sixth, and a sweater in seventh year. That’ll be your knitting NEWT,” Harry joked.

“That’s a great idea,” Hannah said. “I’ve never knitted a sweater before. I bet it would be a fun project. But you’ve got it wrong. I’ll make you one glove, and then one sock. It’s no fun getting the same present twice in a row.”

“You can make one glove for Harry and the other for me,” Neville said.

“Oh, Neville, do you need gardening gloves, by any chance?” Hannah asked him. “In all seriousness.”

Neville hummed in consideration. “My pair is getting pretty worn out, I suppose.”

“That’s what I’ll get you. There. Christmas planning done,” Hannah said, clapping her hands together.

“Takes all the mystery out of it,” Vince grumbled.

Harry, remembering the shrunken head Vince had sent him last year, grimaced. “Could do without your idea of mystery,” he muttered. Vince smirked.

“Don’t worry, Harry, I’ll get you something wicked,” he said. A moment later, his face fell.

“What’s the matter?” Harry asked. Vince looked up at him and his eyes glazed over, as if he had fallen asleep on the spot. Harry swatted his shoulder. “Hello?”

“Huh?” Vince mumbled. “Sorry. I spaced out.”

Harry rolled his eyes. Vince’s short attention span was legendary.

“Don’t get me anything this year, Vince,” Hannah said. “Seriously. I’m not sure I’d survive it if you did.”

“What did he get you last year?” Harry asked.

Hannah shuddered. “A demonic hand mirror.”

“What?” Harry choked out, laughing. Hannah stared at him with wide eyes.

“I’m not joking. It seems normal during the day, but when you look at it at night your reflection has these glowing red eyes and starts saying really disturbing stuff,” she said.

“Disturbing stuff, like what?” Harry asked.

“Don’t look behind you. I know where you sleep. You look delicious tonight. That sort of thing,” Hannah said, counting off on her fingers. Harry raised his eyebrows.

He turned to Vince. “Where do you find this stuff?”

Vince grinned. “My father’s a product tester for the Artificer’s Office. We’ve got all sorts of strange things at home. You wouldn’t believe the sorts of rubbish artificers invent.”

“What are artificers?” Hannah asked.

“The people who make new stuff,” said Vince. “Anything you’ve got in your house was invented by somebody, right? Talking mirrors—the normal ones, astronomical clocks, inextinguishable candles, that sort of thing. Any time somebody makes a new thing and wants to sell it to a lot of people, it has to go through the Artificer’s Office first.”

“I’ve never thought about that, but it makes sense,” Harry murmured. If anybody could just sell anything they created, there would be too much potential for wrongdoing. And Petri certainly hadn’t invented most of what he sold in his shop, even though he produced it all.

“Hold on, so you’re saying it’s rubbish, rejected things you’ve been giving us as presents?” Hannah asked, crossing her arms, though she was unsuccessfully hiding a grin.

“They’re unique artefacts you can’t get elsewhere,” Vince argued with surprising alacrity, a haughty look coming over his face. Harry wondered if he had copied it off Draco.

“You know that’s not what people normally mean when they say ‘unique artefact,’ right?” said Hannah. “They have to actually do something impressive.”

Vince shook his head. “They don’t. They’re magic items and they’re one-of-a-kind. That’s all a unique artefact is. Doesn’t have to be the Rod of Merlin to count.”

Hannah pursed her lips, looking uncertain. Harry glanced over to Neville, who was experimentally folding some bits of parchment on the side and studiously not looking up. “So what did Vince get you last year?”

“Oh,” Neville murmured, smiling a little. He reached back to his rucksack and took out a mossy rock. “This. It’s a moistening stone. Makes the air around it all humid. It’s perfect for Trevor.”

“That’s… really thoughtful of you, Vince,” Harry said, though privately he wondered why Neville had got the only useful present. Did that mean that Vince liked him more, or less?

“What did he get you?” Hannah asked Harry, and he had to explain about the shrunken head alarm clock. To his surprise, she said, “I’ve seen one of those before. On the Knight Bus.”

Harry gaped. “Seriously?”

Hannah nodded. “Well, it’s not an alarm clock, but it does talk. It announces the next stop.”

“Hold on, so there are magical buses?” Harry asked.

“Just the one, I think,” Hannah said. “It’s a bit pricey, but it goes anywhere, any time, even muggle places. You just stick your wand out on the side of the road to…” She trailed off suddenly, glancing up and biting her lip, and Harry looked behind him to find Penelope hovering above his shoulder like a wraith.

“You lot have got the spell,” she said. Harry couldn’t tell if it was a question.

“Yeah,” he said, nodding jerkily. Somehow, he felt a stab of nervousness in his chest, as if he had been caught off task in a lesson, which was ridiculous.

“That’s good,” said Penelope, nodding and wandering off. “Gemma. Everybody’s got the spell.”

Gemma, who was sitting on one of the glass tables with her legs crossed, shot her an unimpressed look before pulling out a silver pocket watch and examining it. “It’s nine hours ‘til Cygnus culminates,” she said. “You’re not going back to bed until then.”

Penelope gaped at her for a few long moments. “Why Cygnus?” she finally asked.

Gemma raised an eyebrow. “Why not?”

“Well, I wasn’t going to go to bed anyway,” Penelope said after a pause. “I’ve got homework.”

“Have you now?” Gemma asked. “That’s new. Professor Flitwick will be pleasantly surprised.”

“Oh, so you’re just getting on to me because Professor Flitwick put you up to it?” Penelope demanded with sudden fervour. Gemma blinked.

“Are you daft? You…” Gemma glanced around the room, and everybody quickly looked away. She cleared her throat. “Club’s over. See you lot next week.”

Nobody protested this declaration outright, though as they walked out, Hannah muttered, “Who made her president?”

“Penelope obviously needs the help,” Harry said, still convinced that something was off. Penelope had always been a bit bossy, which suited her as a prefect, but never confrontational. He couldn’t see how a change like that could be a consequence of grief.

“I’d rather Gabriel lead,” Hannah said. “He’s way more level-headed.”

Harry hummed. “Gemma knows a lot of spells, though.”

“Hannah!” someone called as they came to the bottom of the tower. Harry saw a tall, vaguely familiar Hufflepuff striding down the corridor towards them.

“Hi Cedric,” said Hannah, turning to meet him. Right—that was the Hufflepuff seeker.

“I’ve got a note for you, from Professor Dumbledore,” said Cedric, holding out a square of parchment.

“Professor Dumbledore? Any idea what it’s about? Hope I’m not in trouble,” Hannah murmured.

“I didn’t read it, of course, but I don’t think it’s anything bad,” Cedric reassured her.

Hannah opened it up on the spot and glanced over it with raised eyebrows before passing it to Harry.

“What?” said Harry, fumbling as he discovered that there were two sheets.

“It just says to please deliver the enclosed to your friend Harry,” she explained. “That’s rather peculiar.”

Harry thought he knew what this was. His suspicions were confirmed as he unfolded the second piece of parchment. “Professor Dumbledore wants to meet with me later this week.”

“Are you in trouble?” Vince asked, having just emerged from the stairwell.

Harry shrugged. “It doesn’t say,” he said honestly, not too eager to explain the content of his ‘private lessons’. He stuffed the note into his pocket. “Are you coming to racing, Vince?”

Vince grunted, which Harry took to as a ‘no’. He said goodbye to his friends and continued down the stairs absently until he reached the entrance hall, where he discovered Filch at the front doors, mopping up muddy footprints and muttering under his breath.

A glance out the windows revealed that it was sleeting.

Never mind racing, Harry thought, even though he was certain that Flint hadn’t let a little thing like inclement weather stop him from holding practice. Before Filch could glimpse him and accuse him of loitering about suspiciously, Harry turned around and went right back upstairs.

As he made it halfway up Ravenclaw Tower, his legs burning from the ten flights of stairs they had already been subjected to, he heard raised voices coming from the sixth year dormitories—“Where is it? It was right there, on my bed before I left!”

It was Penelope. Despite himself, Harry paused and ducked into the alcove before the door, leaning back against a bit of wall in between two bookshelves. He strained his ears, but could only barely hear the other speaker.

“...somewhere, maybe…underneath?”

“I checked there already. I checked everywhere. It’s not here,” Penelope said, her voice going higher and higher.

“...exactly…?”

“It’s a book.”

“A book. That’s a real helpful description for finding something in bloody Ravenclaw Tower.”

The other voice was suddenly audible, and Harry realised belatedly that the speaker was coming out. His mind blanked for a heart-stopping moment before he remembered that he was a wizard. Whipping out his wand, he cracked it over his head with a barely-whispered, “ _Disillusio_.”

Cold slime dribbled down the back of his neck, and he saw his feet blur into the floor. He held his breath as Penelope stepped into the alcove along with a short girl with square spectacles.

“It’s about this big, and bound in leather,” Penelope said, gesturing with her hands. Harry thought that those dimensions might well belong to any book, and Penelope’s roommate seemed to agree, for she scowled.

“That narrows it down to half the books here. Wow, so helpful,” she muttered, gesturing to the shelves decorating the walls. “How about a title? And have you tried a summoning charm?”

“I tried, but it didn’t work. I think maybe it can’t be summoned,” Penelope said.

Her friend sighed. “Why would you spell a book unsummonable? Fine. Maybe Ashley borrowed it?”

“She better not have,” Penelope muttered. “It’s private.”

“Is it your diary?”

“It’s not my diary,” said Penelope, but with a funny intonation that made it sound like it might be somebody else’s diary. The other girl raised an eyebrow. Penelope huffed. “Forget it. I’m going to go take a nap.”

“Farley said you’re banned from sleeping before eleven.”

“Gemma isn’t the boss of me,” said Penelope, crossing her arms, but she looked conflicted. Finally, she turned around and said, “I should work on Flitwick’s essay.”

“Oh, me too. Let’s grab a table.”

Penelope’s roommate started downstairs, and Harry slumped in relief. He was really too nosy for his own good. Waiting for a few moments more, he cancelled the disillusionment charm and made to go upstairs.

As he rounded the corner, he immediately collided with someone and almost tripped down the stairs. Fortunately, they were smaller than him, and he managed to knock them back and catch the railing painfully under his arm.

“Hello Harry.” It was Luna, who looked unperturbed as she picked herself up and straightened out her necklace of corks.

“Hi Luna, sorry,” Harry said, wincing. Some of the contents of her rucksack had fallen out and rolled away, so he bent down to help gather them up. He found several figurines folded out of newspaper, a somewhat bruised banana, and a leather-bound book. He sucked in a breath. Feeling a little silly, he peeked at the flyleaf of the book, as if it might give him some indication as to whether it belonged to Penelope.

In fact, it did one better. He forgot to breathe as he read, ‘Property of Percival Weasley’.

“Why do you have this?” Harry asked, trying not to sound too accusatory.

Luna gave him a guileless stare. “Ginny asked me to look for it, because it had gone missing. As you can see, I found it.”

Harry deflated instantly. “Oh.” He handed it back to Luna, uncertain. He supposed since Percy had been her brother, Ginny had every right to want that book back. Still, he couldn’t help his curiosity. “Did you happen to find it in there?” he asked, gesturing vaguely towards the sixth year alcove.

“Did the nargles tell you that?” Luna asked in lieu of answering.

“The what?”

“The nargles. They’re little creatures that like to take things and hide them away, you see. But that means they’re also great finders,” she explained. “They’re always taking my shoes.”

Harry glanced down and saw that she was barefoot again. He grimaced. He was pretty sure that those ‘nargles’ had names like Marietta Edgecombe and Michelle Allen. There was a whole gaggle of girls who liked to gather in the far corner every night to chatter about inane topics like who was wearing what cut of school robe, and indeed, what it would take to get ‘Loony Lovegood’ to get a pair of normal shoes instead of those bulky monstrosities.

“No, it wasn’t the nargles,” Harry said. “I just overheard Penelope saying that she was looking for a book like that as well. You’d better go before she finds out you have it.”

Luna slipped the book and her paper figurines back into her bag. The banana she opened and took a bite from, a pensive look on her face.

She chewed and swallowed. “Would you like to come with me?”

“Go with you? Where?” Harry asked.

“To meet Ginny, of course. We’re investigating Percy’s death. It’s very top secret,” Luna said, putting a finger to her lips.

Harry frowned. “If it’s top secret, are you sure you should be telling me?”

Luna nodded. “Ginny won’t mind. You don’t think that Percy killed himself, do you?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Harry said, not entirely ready to be put on the spot. “It does seem suspicious to me. I don’t understand why nobody’s done any investigating.”

He gave this same answer to Ginny down by the entrance to the Great Hall when she demanded why he had been brought along. After a moment, she crossed her arms and gave him an approving nod.

“Adults think they know everything, but they can’t see what’s right in front of them. The Percy I know,” here her entire body seized up for a moment, but she continued resolutely, “he wouldn’t have done himself in. And if he had, he would’ve written a whole treatise about it first! There wasn’t even a note.”

Harry glanced at the book in her hands. “Is that his diary?”

Ginny blinked. “This? No, this is some history book. I,” she hesitated, “this sounds a bit mad, but I think it could be cursed.”

Alarmed, Harry stared at the bare skin of her fingers wrapped around its spine. “If it’s cursed, shouldn’t you not be touching it?”

She shrugged. “I’ve touched it before and nothing happened to me. It’s a book, so I figure you have to read it for it to get you. Dad’s told us all about things like that. He once found this book that would curse you to talk in limericks for the rest of your life if you read it through.”

“That limerick book sounds most dastardly. We ought’t read things so haphazardly. There are so many charms that can do such great harms, but that’s how it is with wizardry,” said Luna. “Actually, it doesn’t seem so bad.”

Harry and Ginny stared at her in silence for a few seconds.

“Bastardly,” said Ginny all of a sudden. “That rhymes better with ‘dastardly’. You should’ve worked it in somehow.”

They burst into hysterical giggles. Ginny clutched the book to her chest and glanced around. “Let’s not just stand around here. Come on. I’ve got a good place.”

She led them through an unassuming door to the side of the Great Hall, which opened into a warmly lit stairwell. Though they must be underground, Harry found the ambiance distinctly cosier than that of the dungeons. Perhaps it was the generous width of the corridor and the comparatively low ceiling, no higher than in an ordinary house. Suits of armour flanked the corridor, and between them hung various still lifes depicting sumptuous selections of food.

“Here we are,” Ginny said, turning to a painting of a gigantic bowl of fruit. “You just tickle the pear, like so.”

She reached out and wiggled her fingers over the pear, which shuddered and let out a high-pitched giggle. It morphed into a green doorknob.

“How did you even find out about this?” Harry asked, amazed by the trick. Ginny grinned at him secretively and pulled open the door.

“I have my sources. Behold! The kitchens,” she said with a sweeping bow.

Harry was floored at the sight of the enormous space, at least the size of the Great Hall and almost as tall. On the right side as they entered were roaring brick ovens, gleaming counter-tops, and an endless row of pots and pans hanging from the walls. And the elves—there were dozens of house elves, old and young, tall and short, all dressed in perfectly pressed tea towels emblazoned with the Hogwarts crest.

One of the elves, tiny and round-nosed, broke off from the rest and stepped up to the students as they climbed through the portrait hole.

“Master and misses, What can Nelly be doing for you?” asked the elf in a squeaky voice.

“We just need a private place to talk,” Ginny told her.

“Right this way. Would you be liking a cup of tea?” Nelly asked.

“Sure,” Ginny said. The elf steered them to the left, where four long tables identical to the ones that must be above them in the Great Hall stood polished and bare. As they took their seats where the Gryffindor table would have been, a contingent of elves slid a tray with a tea set and a plate of chocolate digestives in front of them. The tea began to pour itself, working alongside several little pitchers of milk. Luna took a biscuit, trading it for her empty banana peel, which an elf immediately took away.

Harry picked up his cup and blew on it, preparing to take a sip, when he noticed that his tea was a cloudy red instead of the expected beige. A careful sniff revealed a distinctly metallic smell. Bloody tea—that was new.

He drank an experimental mouthful, figuring that it would impolite not to try it. Instantly, he felt wide awake. He took another mechanical sip, his eyes darting to the delicate black and gold china of the pitcher nearest him. No doubt that was where the blood was.

Ginny, oblivious to his discovery, dropped the book onto the table, rattling their cups. “Right. So like I was saying, I think this book has something to do what happened to Percy. Hear me out. I actually got the idea because of you, Harry.”

“Me?” Harry said, tearing his gaze away from the tea set in surprise.

“This morning, you said that Penelope seemed like she’d been cursed,” Ginny explained.

“Hannah told me it was grief,” Harry said.

Ginny scoffed and slammed a fist on the table. “ _I’m_ grieving. My own bloody brother offed himself for no apparent reason, and the girl who he had a fling with, who dumped him as soon as it got rough, has the nerve to be all torn up? To miss lessons and drop clubs because woe is me?” She clenched her teeth, swallowing thickly. “So I was angry about that, but then you said she might be cursed, and it made sense all of a sudden. But it’s horrible, and I hope you’re wrong, even though I think you’re right. This book. You see, I was the one—I gave this book to Percy.”

“Why would you give him a cursed book?” Luna asked.

Harry thought this was a very tactless question, but Ginny took it in stride, even going so far as to give Luna a watery grin.

“I didn’t know it was cursed at the time, obviously. I’m still not sure if it is. This is only a theory. How are we supposed to find out? I’ll have to write to Bill,” she muttered, breathing a little erratically.

“Bill?” Harry asked.

“My brother. Oldest brother. He’s a curse breaker,” she clarified, calming somewhat. “Still, the fact that Penelope had this book is sort of evidence that something strange is going on, right? This book isn’t exactly anything special, otherwise.”

She opened the book, and Harry choked on his tea, only barely managing not to spew bloody water everywhere. He forced himself to swallow before turning around and coughing violently. Even so, the first page of the book, upside-down though it had been, was already imprinted in his mind’s eye in vivid detail. At the top left corner stood, ‘Property of Percival Weasley’, and under that in gothic print and surrounded by an elaborate leaf-patterned frame was written, _Bridging the Veil_.

“Is it wise to look inside?” Luna asked as Harry massaged his throat. He nodded furiously in agreement with this question.

“Don’t worry,” said Ginny. “I’ve looked before and I’m still here. Actually I’ve even read some of it. It’s dead boring, which is why I gave it to Percy in the first place.”

“Where did you get it from?” Harry asked, gulping more tea to press down the urge to cough. Ginny seemed to take after her troublemaker brothers, the twins, so he wouldn’t put it past her to have sneaked into Knockturn Alley and found something off Borgin and Burkes’ discount shelf.

“That’s the thing. I don’t know. I just found it in my cauldron with the rest of my school books. I figured we’d accidentally stolen it from Flourish and Blotts or something, but now I’m not so sure,” Ginny said.

“That sounds really suspicious,” Luna said.

“Thanks. I suppose I was just daft back then,” Ginny muttered.

Luna frowned. “Three months ago?”

“A lot can change in three months,” Ginny said, pressing her lips together. “I didn’t question it since it didn’t seem out of the ordinary. Like I said, I even read some of it and it didn’t burn my eyeballs or force me to keep reading or anything. Percy’s birthday was coming up and I figured, this kind of dry material was right up his alley, so I gave it to him.”

Luna hummed. “It could be the work of nargles. The book appearing in your things, then going missing after your brother’s death, then appearing again to Penelope. It fits perfectly.”

“Nargles or not, I think the next thing we need to do is confirm whether it’s actually cursed. Harry, you know quite a few spells, don’t you?” Ginny asked. “Know any to detect curses?”

Harry jumped a little in his seat, realising that he had been staring into his empty teacup. Fortunately, there weren’t enough dregs to read anything intelligible.

“I could try something,” Harry said. He pulled the book closer to him gingerly, despite having seen for a fact that touching it had no immediately negative effect. He waved his wand over it. “ _Specialis revelio._ ”

Somewhat to his surprise and trepidation, the book came up clean. He bit his lip. “Either it’s a totally ordinary book, or there’s some serious dark magic going on. Spell-revealing charm isn’t showing anything.”

He remembered he had another trick up his sleeve and turned his wand on himself. “ _Structuram vedo,_ ” he muttered, blinking as his vision was overtaken by a formless soup of dancing golden sparks. House elves, it turned out, were absolutely blinding. He furrowed his brows and cast the spell again, trying to tune out static magic and lower the intensity somewhat.

The book was obvious enough—a solid, dark blue blob against a backdrop of white and gold. Why a book would be saturated in alteration magic, was the real question. He cancelled the structure sight and reported this unsatisfactory finding.

“Alteration… like transfiguration?” Ginny asked. “It’s not really a book?”

“Alteration doesn’t have to be transfiguration,” Luna pointed out. “Perhaps the book alters the reader?”

“Bloody hell,” Ginny muttered. “It’s a book that makes you depressed. That must be it.”

“That does fit,” Harry agreed, thinking about the drastic change that had overcome Penelope. He frowned. “Wait. But how did Penelope end up with it? If it was cursing Percy, shouldn’t he have had it up until—well, yeah…”

“Dunno,” said Ginny, frowning. “Doesn’t really matter, though. What should we do now? Maybe we should hand the book over the aurors?”

“Dumbledore,” Harry blurted before he could properly think. “I mean, we should tell Professor Dumbledore what we’ve found out. It would be easier than getting the aurors to take us seriously, right?”

“I suppose,” Ginny said. “Do you know how to make an appointment to see him? I don’t even know where his office is.”

“I’m actually meeting with him Friday evening. I could bring it to him then,” Harry offered.

“I’ll just come with you to explain things properly. Not that I don’t trust you, but I’d like to keep a hold of this myself for now,” Ginny said, tapping the book.

“All right,” Harry agreed, hoping that Professor Dumbledore wouldn’t mind the change of plans. “His office is on the seventh floor, behind this really huge gargoyle. I think it’s near your common room.”

“Oh, I’ve seen it,” Ginny said. “The hideous one with lumpy eyebrows?”

Harry nodded. “I’m supposed to meet Dumbledore at eight, so let’s try to arrive five minutes early.”

Ginny nodded. “Sounds like a plan.” She stood up and tucked the book under her arm, sighing heavily. “Well, now that that’s settled, I should probably do my potions essay… Luna, want to come?”

Luna stood up as well.

“Catch you later, Harry,” Ginny said, waving as she made her way out the door.

As soon as the portrait swung closed, Harry upended the black pitcher into his teacup with a satisfyingly red splash. As an afterthought, he added some tea and swirled it around before taking an inelegant gulp.

“Would sir be liking more tea?”

Harry jumped in his seat and cradled his cup guiltily to his chest as the elf, Nelly, popped up next to the table. She had blue eyes, clear and inquisitive, very unlike Rosenkol’s dark tunnel of a stare, and her nose was round and squashy. Harry couldn’t help noticing every crevice in her lightly wrinkled face, the creases in her tea towel where it was tied back like a toga, the spidery network of veins pulsing under the nearly translucent skin of her bare arms…

He shook his head. “I’m fine, thanks,” he said, though it came out weaker than he would have liked. He took some measured breaths, and then grabbed the last biscuit and shoved it into his mouth. The sweetness somewhat ameliorated the lingering metallic flavour of his ‘tea’.

Nelly snapped her fingers and the tray leapt into the air after her. Harry’s gaze automatically followed her path through the mass of other elves. It seemed that preliminary dinner preparations were already underway—groups of elves were skinning mounds of carrots and potatoes, chopping onions, and kneading puffy rounds of dough. Nelly transferred the tray to an elf in the back, who was armed with a variety of hovering brushes and sponges and promptly set to washing the dishes.

She trotted back with alacrity upon noting that Harry was still just sitting there. “Is there anything sir is needing? Perhaps a snack?”

“Can I stay here and watch you cook?” Harry asked. “I’m trying to learn.”

“Young master is wishing to learn cooking?” Nelly repeated with a scandalised grimace. “The elves is taking care of that. Wizards is not needing to be learning cooking!”

“Even if I don’t need it, I’d like to learn,” Harry said. “If that’s all right.”

Nelly looked conflicted, but she nodded. “Young master is always being welcome here, of course.”

Harry smiled at her. “Great, thanks. What are you all making for dinner?”

“Tonight’s entrees is being beef casserole, diricawl tikka masala, and pork chops. As always, we is baking fresh rolls and potatoes, pasties, meat pies…” Nelly continued to rattle off an impressive list of dishes and side dishes, culminating in a mouth-watering selection of pudding.

“Where does all the food come from?” Harry asked. He remembered Neville saying that all the vegetables were grown in the greenhouses, but what of the meat?

“We is producing everything here at Hogwarts,” Nelly said, tilting her chin up proudly.

“There are farm animals here, then?” Harry asked.

Nelly nodded, her ears flopping. “Oh yes, there is being chickens and diricawls, which produce many eggs, and we is making eggs into meats.”

“Hold on,” Harry said, blinking. “You mean you can transfigure food into other food?”

The question sounded stupid to him even as it left his mouth. Why wouldn’t that be possible? As far as he knew, Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration (and its exceptions) only described elemental similarity, not elemental _identity_. The fact that anything could be transfigured into something else consisting of the same material was probably so self-evident it didn’t need somebody to formulate it into a law.

“Oh yes, we house elves is often using that trick,” Nelly said. “It is being necessary for serving tasty and nutritious meals.”

Harry frowned. Perhaps he should try to improve his transfiguration instead of his cooking charms. He glanced over to the elves who were chopping and dicing vegetables.

“Why don’t you just transfigure raw food into cooked food?” he asked.

Nelly tugged at her ears. “Oh no, no, that is being most improper. We could be making our masters ill by doing such a thing.”

Harry nodded, though he didn’t think a bit of raw onion was going to hurt anybody, especially if it came in the form of something more appetising. Raw potatoes, on the other hand, might just be poisonous, if Aunt Petunia was to be believed. He supposed he saw the merit in being careful and avoiding such transfigurations altogether.

Upon request, Nelly showed Harry to the workstation where the magic was taking place. Two elves were retrieving eggs from a gigantic basket and cracking them into an equally enormous pail. A third elf beat the mixture vigorously with a long-handled whisk. As Harry looked on, the elves emptied the basket in a matter of seconds and tipped the beaten eggs into a large pan, which they slid into the waiting maw of the oven like a battering ram.

On the other side, more elves were already working with a finished sheet of egg, slicing it into squares which they transformed with regimented snaps of their fingers into glistening cuts of meat. Harry was at a loss as to how he could learn such a transfiguration. All transfigurations that they had done in lessons so far were object-to-object—the more specific and identifiable, the better. To just go from a bit of egg to a bit of pork was mind-boggling.

When he tried to ask Nelly to explain it to him, the elf stared at him like he had grown a second head. “It is changing because we is needing it to. Wizards can not be knowing this—it is house elves’ work.”

It came out almost belligerently, and strangely enough, Harry felt all the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He swallowed and held up his hands.

“Right, sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it,” he mumbled.

Nelly’s glare softened somewhat. “Young master is not apologising to Nelly. Nelly is showing you the bread.”

She patiently explained how the dough was prepared with yeast and how long it ought to be left to rise. Aunt Petunia had never been one for home-made bread, so this was the first time Harry had ever encountered a recipe—surprisingly, it seemed far less difficult than he had imagined.

Next, Nelly took him to the back corner, near the sink, where they were plucking and preparing diricawl, which was real meat.

“It is not being made from anything else, because it is magical,” Nelly explained.

“Magical, how?” Harry asked, having not been aware that the drumsticks he consumed regularly were anything out of the ordinary.

“It is having a special flavour from much apparating and disapparating,” Nelly said. Harry eyed the pale, lumpy flesh of the plucked diricawls doubtfully. As far as he could tell, they tasted just like chicken, with perhaps a tad tougher texture.

Despite himself, Harry soon found his attention drifting as his head spun from the rapid-fire explanations and instructions that Nelly delivered at every station. Perhaps that had been her intention, after all, for she nodded knowingly and steered him back to a table with a fresh cup of tea while he was distracted by the confounding theory of flaky pastry crusts.

It was blood tea again, and it cleared up his head marvellously.

“Say, where is this blood from?” Harry asked.

Nelly beamed. “It is being from Nelly herself! Is young master liking it?”

Immediately struck by some unpleasant mixture of guilt and awkwardness, Harry said, “Oh, yes, it’s very good. But you don’t have to give blood for me. I don’t need it. I’m not really a vampire.”

“Of course not. You is a wizard, and if it is pleasing you, Nelly is very happy to be giving blood to you.” Her eyes glazed over, and an ecstatic smile stole across her face. For the second time that day, Harry felt a prickling foreboding, and all protest died in the back of his throat.

“Thank you,” he said instead. “And thanks for showing me around and everything.”

“No need to be thanking Nelly,” said the elf, looking away self-consciously. She held her hand up. “If sir is finished?”

Harry nodded. Nelly snapped her fingers and floated the tea set away to be taken by another elf before she led him to the exit and bowed him out. It was late afternoon now—Harry couldn’t believe he’d spent over an hour in the kitchens. His head felt crammed too full of information, but when he gave his memory a tentative prod he discovered that he actually might be able to recall everything.

He looked up and had to blink rapidly as he was dazzled by torchlight dancing against textured pigments. As he walked, it was impossible not to notice each lump and groove in the suits of armour, the paintings, and even the wall. He clutched at his temples and tried to move with closed eyes, but that only brought the dull, echoing tap of his trainers against the stone into sharp focus. He could feel the walls and ceiling in his mind’s eye, as if he were reaching out and touching them with his fingertips.

It had to be the blood. He grit his teeth. Of course he was a wizard, Nelly had said. Yet another person who didn’t think it was strange for a wizard to be affected by drinking blood like this. What was it that Petri had said? All that mattered was that he was still alive? That seemed like an arbitrary distinction to make.

Harry remembered the ghost, Sir Dolan, still in his pocket. He had finally just lied to Hannah to placate her and said that his uncle would help release him over the holidays. Sir Dolan was obviously dead, but he still walked, talked, and thought, to some approximation. Vampires like Silviu also counted as dead somehow, even though they could do everything that living people did, including die again. Yet Petri, who could literally summon up spirits of the dead, maintained a hard line—death was very bad, and one should go to any lengths not to die. Groaning, Harry rubbed at his temples again, as if the pressure might ease the knot of confusion in his mind. He wished there was somebody he could talk to about these things, but he had the feeling that his friends just wouldn’t understand his problem.

Perhaps Luna would be interested? She was weird—and didn’t Hannah always call him weird too?

Harry didn’t see Luna in the common room when he arrived. She was probably still doing homework with Ginny. Homework was a good idea. He’d spent far too much of the day already on extracurricular pursuits.

By the time he sat down with his History of Magic essay, his strange blood-induced fit of pique had passed, and his head filled up instead with concerns about the botched terms of surrender in the goblin rebellion of 1752. He didn’t think about any matters of life and death again until Wednesday, when Luna sought him out in the middle of the common room with a wide-eyed look.

“Hello, Harry,” she said loudly, and the girls in the corner giggled. Harry shot them dirty looks, but if anything, this seemed to encourage them.

“Hi Luna,” he murmured.

“Thought you should know that the nargles struck again,” she said. Harry glanced back to the girls and then down to Luna’s feet, which were clad in mismatched socks.

“Your shoes?” he asked.

“No. Well, yes, but that isn’t important. The book,” Luna said.

Harry dropped his quill and sat bolt upright. “That book? P—Ginny’s book?”

Luna nodded with solemn grace.

“What happened?”

“Like I said, nargles took it. I’m sure of it. We already knew they were involved. Remember that it went missing after Percy—”

“Shh,” Harry hissed, scanning the room nervously. Thankfully, Penelope wasn’t there. Come to think of it, he hadn’t seen her since after charms club on Sunday. “Okay, so where do you think it could be? Did you or Ginny tell anybody about it?”

Luna shook her head. “Nargles aren’t very creative. They like to stick to the same spots, so I think it will be exactly where we found it last.”

Harry blinked. “You mean…” He glanced up the stairs that wrapped around the common room. Luna nodded.

That was ridiculous, Harry thought. How could Penelope possibly have discovered that Ginny Weasley had the book and then stolen it out of the Gryffindor dorms? She would have needed an accomplice, like Ginny had Luna, since the book apparently couldn’t be summoned. Harry frowned, trying to remember whether he’d seen Penelope talking to any Gryffindors. She used to spend a lot of time in the library, and Harry had seen Hermione ask her questions before. But did Hermione ever talk to Ginny? He didn’t think so.

He had no better ideas, so he said, “All right. Let’s go check.”

“People are probably there right now, silly,” Luna said.

“I’ve got…” Harry hesitated, thinking of the disillusionment charm, but then remembering that his was far from perfect when the subject was moving, “I’ve got an invisibility cloak. We can go under there.”

Harry got up, shoving his half-finished work into his pockets, and he and Luna crept upstairs. None of his dorm-mates were in at the moment, so he went straight for his cauldron and fished his cloak out.

“Oh, I’ve never seen one of these in real life before,” Luna said, admiring the shimmering fabric. “Where did you get it?”

“It’s a family heirloom, I think,” Harry said.

Luna leaned forward in clear interest. “Do you think it could be one of the Deathly Hallows?”

“The what?” Harry asked without much enthusiasm. He knew better now than to take her wild ideas too seriously.

“Death’s gifts, from the ‘Tale of the Three Brothers’. My daddy says they’re real. He’s been looking for them ever since—well, it would be an exciting scoop, don’t you think, if they were found?” Luna said, her expression darkening for just a moment before returning to its usual airiness.

“Sorry. I don’t actually know that story, so I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” Harry said.

“Oh, it’s a wonderful story.” Luna tapped her chin. “Let’s see… so there were once three brothers who came upon a seemingly impassable river. It had claimed many lives before, and Death was there waiting for anybody foolish enough to try to cross the raging waters. But the brothers were clever wizards, and they conjured a bridge that took them safely to the other side. Unsatisfied, Death appeared to the brothers. He pretended to congratulate them for their ingeniousness. Is that a word?”

Harry shrugged and started for the door.

“Well, it is now. Their ingeniousness. He said he would give them each a reward of their choosing. The eldest brother asked for a wand that could win any duel. So Death took a branch from a nearby elder tree and fashioned it into a wand, and the first brother’s wish was granted. The second brother, not satisfied with one victory over Death, asked for a way to bring back those he had lost. So Death took a stone from the river and said, when you turn this stone thrice, the dead will return to you.”

Harry froze at the top of the landing. “A river stone, you said? And it calls a spirit?”

Luna nodded. “Have you seen something like that before?”

He regretted speaking. Luna was too perceptive. “I’ve read about something similar, yeah,” he said honestly. What were the odds that a fairy tale had an accurate description of a tool for conjuring the dead? Perhaps rising stones had been in wider use back when it had first been written.

“Oh, where?” Luna asked.

“I’m not sure,” Harry said lamely, hurrying down the steps. Luna hummed, but let it go in favour of continuing the story.

“Okay. Well, the youngest brother was wary of Death, so he asked for a way to hide from Death. Reluctantly, Death took the cloak from his own shoulders and gave it to the third brother, explaining that nobody, not even Death, would see him while he wore it. So those are the three Deathly Hallows—the elder wand, the resurrection stone, and the cloak of invisibility.”

Harry blinked. “The story just ends there?”

“Oh no, there’s more, but I’ll tell you later. Or I can just lend you the book.” Luna said. She held out her hand.

“What?” said Harry.

“Your cloak, silly. Boys can’t go into the girl’s dormitories,” Luna said.

“What, really?” Harry muttered. Luna had just been in his dorm, so the opposite clearly wasn’t true. How unfair.

He felt an irrational burst of reluctance to hand over the cloak, especially after hearing Luna’s story, but forced himself past it and deposited it onto her arm. It was just a fairy tale. What would it even mean for a cloak to hide somebody from ‘Death’s sight’? Would he be literally immortal while wearing it? That wasn’t exactly something he would like to test.

Luna draped the cloak over herself and pulled the hood up, vanishing from sight as soon as she drew back her arms.

Harry settled down next to a bookshelf and activated his glasses, pushing through a long stretch wall before finally emerging inside the girl’s dormitory. He felt absurdly like he was peeping. Well, he supposed he was, but not _that way_. Fortunately, the only girl there was Penelope, and she was only sitting on her bed, reading.

But she wasn’t reading just anything—Percy’s book was in her hand, and Harry saw that she had a quill in the other, and was actually writing something in it.

So Luna had been right. Was it just a lucky guess? Had she somehow conspired to give it back to Penelope? Were nargles actually real? Harry blinked back to his ordinary vision, reeling at the sudden shift. About a minute later, Luna reappeared and reported what he had seen—that Penelope had the book.

“I couldn’t get it, though, since she was holding it,” Luna said with a contrite look.

“That’s fine,” Harry said, though he couldn’t help frowning. Waiting until Friday to report to Dumbledore suddenly seemed like an unconscionably long time. Who knew what damage the book could do by then? At the same time, he wasn’t even sure if anything could be done. Dumbledore couldn’t exactly have Penelope’s things searched based on some circumstantial evidence. His hands had been tied when it had come to Draco’s possible involvement in the attack on Harry, after all.

“If at first you don’t succeed, just try again later,” Luna said. “That’s what Ginny always says.”

“Sounds like good advice,” Harry agreed.

“Maybe the nargles will get bored and move it again,” said Luna.

“I hope not,” Harry muttered. “Then how will we find it?”

They needn’t have worried on that score. Harry checked in on the sixth-year girls’ dormitory every chance he could—it turned out that he could see it from his own dorm if he focused his glasses hard enough—and each time he saw Penelope in practically the same position, still reclining on her bed with the book in hand. It remained clutched to her chest even when she was asleep.

As a result, Harry arrived to his meeting with Dumbledore empty handed and alone—he had pointed out to Ginny that there was no reason for her to be there when she didn’t have the book anymore. She had reacted a little mutinously, but agreed in the end that Harry could explain things on his own, as long as he told her exactly how it had gone afterwards.

Dumbledore, on the other hand, was not alone. He had dragged his chair over to the fireplace and was bent over, talking to a disembodied, hairy head wreathed in green flames.

“My apologies, I have an appointment now. We can catch up later, say, at the Hog’s Head?” Dumbledore said to the fire as Harry retreated awkwardly into the threshold. There wasn’t much space on the landing before the moving staircase.

“Couldn’t say no ter that!” said a gruff voice that sounded rather familiar. Was that Hagrid? Hadn’t he been indicted?

The fire flared orange again, and Professor Dumbledore stood up. “Come in, Harry. Please, have a seat.”

He levitated his own chair back behind his desk, which was piled full of papers. Harry eyed them curiously as he sat, noting that they seemed largely to be correspondence. He quickly looked up as Dumbledore began to speak.

“As you know, I have been wary of taking any long absences from Hogwarts since the incidents earlier this year.”

Harry nodded. “About that—before we talk about Voldemort, there was something I wanted to tell you about, sir.”

“Of course,” said Dumbledore, nodding for him to continue.

“It’s about Percy. We think he was cursed. We found a book that he had, which had some sort of alteration magic on it, and now Penelope—Penelope Clearwater—has it, and she’s in a bad state,” Harry said. He almost winced as he reviewed what he had said. None of it sounded very substantial.

Dumbledore steepled his fingers. “And who, may I ask, are ‘we’?”

Harry furrowed his brow as he opened his mouth. He felt like he was snitching, somehow, even though it wasn’t as if they’d done anything to get in trouble, at least if he did not mention how they had stolen the book from Penelope. “Ginny Weasley and I,” Harry said, deciding to leave Luna some plausible deniability.

“I see. Thank you for sharing your concerns. I will look into the matter,” Dumbledore said.

Harry bit his lip, but nodded. “Thank you, sir. I just don’t want Penelope to get hurt. Not if it can be stopped. She hasn’t left Ravenclaw Tower all week.”

Professor Dumbledore nodded. “Rest assured that Professor Flitwick and I shall do everything in our power to ensure her safety. Now, is there anything else you would like to speak about?”

Harry shook his head. “We can talk about Voldemort’s immortality now.”

Dumbledore’s eyes crinkled slightly, as if he were amused. “Excellent. As I was saying previously, I have been unable to travel outside of Hogwarts for long stretches of time ever since the end of October. However, letter-writing was still available to me, so letters I have written, and some of them have borne fruit. I have consolidated the best ones here for us to review. You will forgive me for delaying this meeting as long as I have. I was hoping to receive one reply in particular first, from an informant of mine in Albania.”

Here, he took the topmost roll of parchment from a stack and unfurled it, pinning it to the desk with his elbow. “You see, shortly after Voldemort’s fall, rumours began to arise of a dark presence in a certain Albanian forest. There were reports of travellers vanishing, or else getting lost for days before stumbling out of the woods with no memory of having gone in. A national landmark became effectively inaccessible, something which was naturally very distressing for the Albanian ministry of magic, so the ICW sent representatives to aid in the investigation. It was through these efforts that we discovered that Voldemort was still alive, in the barest sense of the word, and had repurposed the forest into his own dark sanctuary, which nobody who meant him harm could penetrate.”

Dumbledore paused to look down at the letter he had opened, and Harry took the opportunity to ask, “Sir, how did he get all the way to Albania as a wraith? I don’t suppose he could just appear wherever he wanted, like a ghost? Sorry if that’s a stupid question.”

“On the contrary, it is a most sensible question,” Dumbledore assured him. “Ghosts, incidentally, cannot appear anywhere they want. They may manifest only in locations that were significant to them in life. I imagine that Voldemort was rather more constrained than even that, as he otherwise could have infiltrated Hogwarts with impunity at any time. No, my hunch is that there was nowhere other than that forest in Albania that Voldemort could have gone, for that was where the mechanism for his rebirth was hidden. You must understand, Harry, that consciousness is necessarily a function of the body. That which has no physical body of some kind cannot maintain self-awareness.”

“But sir, ghosts haven’t got bodies,” Harry objected, unable to hold back the argumentative spirit that had been ingrained into him by his house.

“You are correct, of course, that ghosts have no bodies,” Dumbledore said, a challenging glimmer in his eye.

“You’re saying, sir,” Harry began, a little hesitant, “that ghosts aren’t self-aware?” But that was ridiculous, he didn’t say.

“There is some debate on the topic, and it would perhaps be too much of a digression to go into the details for now. If you are interested, I shall put down the name of some books you might consult. I hear that Ravenclaws are quite partial to the written word,” Dumbledore said, summoning a quill into his hand. Harry nodded.

“Well yes, can’t argue with that. Those books would be appreciated, sir,” he said, and Dumbledore penned a few lines in his generous, loopy handwriting. Harry glanced down at the slip as it slid across the desk to his side. These were not just any books—the parchment he had been given was a pass to the Restricted Section. “Thank you, sir.”

“Certainly. Now, where were we?” Dumbledore murmured, glancing down at the letter in front of him again. “Ah, yes. We can infer that Voldemort had visited Albania at some prior time in order to install the piece of magic that would allow him to manifest his consciousness there if his body was destroyed. Does anything about this strike you as odd, Harry?”

Harry blinked at the sudden question. He took a moment to gather his thoughts. “Why Albania?” he finally said. “It’s a bit far, isn’t it?”

Dumbledore put his hands together, his eyes crinkling as he nodded. “Precisely. Why Albania, rather than a more convenient location where his followers, largely English wizards, could easily find him and aid him? The simplest answer, I should think, is that no other location was suitable. Something special, perhaps even unique, lay in that forest, something not easily removed.”

“And you know what it is, sir?” Harry asked, leaning forward.

Dumbledore smiled. “I haven’t the faintest idea. Immortality was never something that interested me, though I am necessarily familiar with it as a student of alchemy. There are always whispers, of course, of the lengths that desperate wizards have gone to prolong and safeguard their lives, but the finer details are not so easily overheard.”

“Oh,” said Harry, a little taken aback, having half expected Dumbledore to be an expert on everything there was to know. But of course that would be ludicrous. He even knew it wasn’t true, because Dumbledore had previously admitted that he had never studied divination.

Harry was reminded now of what the cards had told him up in Trelawney’s stuffy tower. Voldemort had learned of immortality in a faraway land that Harry had identified as China, which was most certainly farther away than Albania, even according to his extremely lacklustre knowledge of geography.

“Is there something you wish to tell me, Harry?” Dumbledore asked, peering at him over the edges of his spectacles.

“I suppose, sir. It’s just, Professor Trelawney helped me do some scrying, and we found out that Voldemort had gone to China, and that people there had taught him about immortality. Do you think that could be right, sir?” Harry asked.

Dumbledore’s eyebrows flew into his hairline before concern overtook his face. “China, you say? It is plausible. I could see just how it would happen.”

Now it was Harry’s turn to be surprised. “Really, sir? How?”

“To see it, you will require some background on Chinese wizards, or rather, cultivators, as they call themselves. Are you at all familiar with them?” Dumbledore asked.

Harry shook his head.

Dumbledore smiled wryly. “Alas, our History of Magic lessons cover only a myopic selection of local events and neglect international and ancient history altogether. A grave mistake, perhaps. Still, you are aware, I hope, that magic as we know it here and in Europe was born some two thousand years ago in the Roman Empire. Because of its efficacy, Latin spellcasting with wands became extremely dominant in a short period of time, nearly obliterating the varied traditions that had come before, and very little ancient magic has survived to the present day.”

Harry nodded, even though he hadn’t exactly known that. Still, this story made perfect sense, unlike the rambling dates and facts from History of Magic that were so difficult to remember. He wished they could replace Professor Binns with Professor Dumbledore.

Dumbledore continued, “In contrast, the magical tradition in the far east has enjoyed a far longer period of unbroken development, almost in complete isolation from the west. Where the focus for wizards in Rome was on performing miracles that would be unimaginable without magic—transfiguration and conjuration, for instance—Chinese cultivators were much more interested in developing their existing capabilities to supernatural levels. Thus, almost all their techniques are applied internally, granting them great strength, speed, wit, and vitality. Because of their seemingly endless lives, western wizards came to know them as immortals. This moniker would undoubtedly have drawn Voldemort’s intrigue.”

“But they aren’t really immortal, are they?” Harry asked—a whole society of immortals just seemed incredible.

“No, indeed. They can and certainly do die, often in combat. They are no more immortal than Nicolas was. However, the extension of life was certainly something that Voldemort was interested in. He pursued alchemy at first, attending dozens of symposiums and demonstrations, similar to the one you saw during our last meeting. He even attempted to secure an apprenticeship with Nicolas. I, of course, advised my friend of Voldemort’s unscrupulous nature, sparing him, I would like to think, from an earlier and nastier end. Unwilling to settle for less than the best, Voldemort seemed to drop the subject entirely. I would not be surprised at all to learn that he stumbled upon Chinese cultivation as an alternative.”

Harry frowned. “So we think he was in China and Albania. Couldn’t there be loads of other places he went that we have no idea of, sir?”

“Yes, that is likely, even. I suspect that Voldemort followed every lead about immortality to its end, learning from each flawed method he found as he attempted to construct the genuine article. For you see, nobody in this world has ever made themselves truly immune to death. Even Voldemort, though he appears to have met with some success so far,” here, Dumbledore’s lip curled briefly in disgust, “is nowhere near reaching his ideal.”

“How do you know that, sir?” Harry asked, thinking that Voldemort had gone rather far indeed. “What if there’s really no way to kill him?”

The lines of Dumbledore’s face were firm with certainty. “There is a way. Even if Voldemort is immortal in the sense that he cannot be killed directly, this immortality is necessarily dependent on external instruments, instruments which can be destroyed. We have evidence enough for that, in knowing that the nexus of his rebirth has a fixed location. In fact, we now know quite a bit more, given the content of this letter, which I shall share with you.”

Harry had almost forgotten about the letter. He tried now to read it upside down but discovered after a few moments that it wasn’t in English. Dumbledore adjusted his glasses and cleared his throat. “Since Voldemort’s revival, the forest in which he was hiding has become accessible again—only since his revival this past summer, and not his initial departure over a year and a half ago. This is a most critical distinction, because it suggests that Voldemort was still physically in Albania for the entirety of last year.”

“Sorry, how does it suggest that, sir?” Harry asked, bewildered. “And why is that important?”

“As the forest is no longer impenetrable now that Voldemort is definitively away from it, we may conclude either that Voldemort considers it unnecessary to maintain its protection while he is not there, or that he is simply incapable of it. If the latter is the case, it naturally follows that he had been present before. If it is the former, then we would have to ask why he bothered maintaining the protection for over a year, if he was absent during that time,” Dumbledore said.

Harry took a moment to think, before he said, “Well, maybe he didn’t want you to know that he had left?”

“Then he would have accomplished it far better had he not almost immediately made a bold-faced attempt to acquire the philosopher’s stone. You must have wondered why Nicolas entrusted me with the stone in the first place. It was because he no longer had need of it. Somebody had broken into his home in search of the stone, and though they were unsuccessful, Nicolas’s wife was killed in the altercation, leaving him with little lust for eternity. You must understand that Perenelle Flamel had lived as long as Nicolas and was an extremely formidable witch. I can count on one hand the number of people who could have bested her in a duel. Voldemort may as well have sent along a letter of intent,” Dumbledore concluded, his gaze flinty.

“Oh. That’s horrible,” Harry said, a little stunned by the story. For some reason, in his mind, the fact that Nic’s wife had been some six hundred years old only made her murder more tragic. Perhaps it was the thought that she could have lived a thousand years more, if it weren’t for the Dark Lord.

“I apologise. I should not have burdened you with such a heavy tale,” Dumbledore said, looking genuinely contrite.

Harry blinked in surprise and hurried to reassure him. “It’s all right, sir. Thank you for telling me—I think it’s better to know, even if the truth is a bad one.”

“A wise outlook,” Dumbledore said, his eyes regaining some of their twinkle. “In any case, we have veered from the topic at hand, so let us return to it. Voldemort remained physically in Albania even while he possessed others in different locations. As for how that knowledge is useful to us, we come upon the second point—my informant,” here he gestured to the letter, “was trapped inside that forest for the entirety of Voldemort’s time there, unable to leave just as others were unable to properly enter. I had assumed, up until recently, that she had died, and was most relieved to find out otherwise. Curiously, she had no recollection of ever stumbling upon anything dark or out of the ordinary there—she was simply incapable of finding an exit no matter how hard she searched. So I asked her to determine if there was any place in the forest where she had never gone. Ten years, you see, should be more than long enough to have memorised the entirety of the area back to front. As I suspected, there was indeed a particular grove, some hundred meters across, that was completely unfamiliar to her, though otherwise there was nothing apparently strange about it. This leaves us with a reasonably precise location for Voldemort’s tool and some understanding of what it does. The question is—if Voldemort is once more deprived of a body, and in that very moment somebody is standing in the centre of that grove—what will they see?”

“So you think you can ambush him, sir?” Harry asked.

“I think that if Voldemort is half as clever as he thinks himself to be, he would anticipate this line of thought and change his safeguards, if possible. At the very least, he would send a follower to keep watch on the area, so that it will not be so simple for one of us to lie in wait,” Dumbledore said.

Harry wondered who ‘us’ was referring to. Surely neither Harry nor Dumbledore could realistically be tasked to sit in some bush, waiting for Voldemort to kick the bucket. The very idea made Harry’s lip twitch inappropriately.

“I see,” Harry said, even though he didn’t really see how all this was of practical use. “But even forgetting the part where he can come back to life—how is anybody supposed to kill him in the first place? Could you do it, sir? If you duelled him, do you think you would win?”

Dumbledore was famous for having defeated Grindelwald, wasn’t he?

Dumbledore sighed deeply. Then he said, unequivocally, “Yes. I would win. However, for reasons which I cannot reveal to you, for your own safety, I must never take a life, not even one as abhorrent as Voldemort’s, not even in defence of my own life or the lives of others. It would be equally profligate of me to enter a duel without the intention of winning it, and to overcome Voldemort without the use of deadly force would be beyond even my abilities.”

Harry could only gape at this extraordinary answer.

Taking pity on him, Dumbledore lifted his arm, allowing the letter to furl up again, and clasped his hands together. “That will be all for tonight, I should think. I shall investigate Voldemort’s potential presence in China, and whether it might clarify the continued mystery of his soul’s compatibility with his new body—thank you for bringing the possibility to my attention. The next time we meet will likely be after the holidays. Remember that if Voldemort or any agent of his contacts you, you are on no account obligated to keep silent on what you have learned. Your personal safety should be your first priority—I would ask that you stay close to your guardian at all times, and do not venture out alone.”

“Right. Thank you, sir,” Harry said, though he thought little of this paternalistic advice. It wasn’t as if Petri was going to defend him effectively from the Dark Lord, if it came down to it.

He stood up too quickly and winced as his knees locked. Hobbling slightly, he moved around the chair and stumbled out the door, embroiled in his thoughts.

Learning in more detail about how Voldemort could not be killed did not inspire increased confidence in his life prospects. Even more depressingly, Dumbledore had admitted that he could theoretically just defeat the Dark Lord head on, but was prevented by some unspecified reason that Harry shouldn’t know about. Another prophecy? It didn’t matter. Harry knew that his own destiny basically precluded Dumbledore from acting successfully, even if he wanted to, until _after_ Harry died at Voldemort’s hand, which wasn’t much of a consolation.

And why had Dumbledore reminded him again that he hadn’t been sworn to secrecy? It was almost as if he _wanted_ Harry to spill everything to the Dark Lord. But that was ridiculous, wasn’t it?


	51. Duellist

Ginny wasted no time in cornering Harry on Saturday morning at breakfast, simply popping up in front of him as he entered the Great Hall and manhandling him over to the Gryffindor table. It was eight o'clock on a weekend, so the space under the red and gold banners was very sparsely occupied, and they had no trouble claiming a spot well out of the way of any other early risers.

"So what did Professor Dumbledore say?" Ginny demanded as soon as they slid into their seats.

"He said he'd look into it," Harry said.

Ginny scowled. "That's it?"

"Well, what did you expect?" Harry asked, a little defensive. "I told him that Penelope had the book, and that I was worried about her getting hurt. I'm pretty sure he believed me."

"Okay, that's good, I suppose," Ginny muttered, stabbing a spoon into her oats with enough force to clink against the bottom of the bowl.

"I'll let you know if it doesn't look like anything's been done by next week," Harry suggested.

"Make it tomorrow," Ginny said, pointing her spoon at him. Tomorrow seemed a little soon to expect action, but Harry agreed.

Perhaps he had underestimated Dumbledore, however. Later that day, when Harry returned to the common room, he saw Professor Flitwick speaking with Penelope by the fireside in low tones, some sort of privacy spell muffling their words. When he covertly spied on Penelope's dormitory again, Harry saw no sign of the book anywhere. Just to be certain, he checked a few hours later and observed the same result. Penelope, too, was not there—Harry overheard from Robert that she had been admitted to the hospital wing.

The rest of the month passed without any life-threatening excitement. Harry felt only mounting dread at the rapidly approaching holidays, however. He could not put his mind into his schoolwork—it all seemed absolutely trivial in the face of the threat of Voldemort, who was literally immortal, whatever technicalities Dumbledore liked to bring up in order to claim otherwise.

It was odd. He had never felt such existential terror as in the depths of the night, curled up in his bed and faced with—what had Dumbledore called it—that looming spectre of death? He had stood in front of Lord Voldemort himself with only a fraction of this fear.

On reflection, it wasn't odd at all. Harry would gladly go before the Dark Lord again, right this second, rather than stew in this miserable swamp of uncertainty. Over the course of term, cut off from contact with his enemy, Harry had lost his tenuous grasp on Voldemort's present goals and motivations. He couldn't predict what the Dark Lord would do next, couldn't know if he had changed his mind.

Because what if he had? What if his next words to Harry would be those fateful two? This time, Harry would have no power of love to shield him. There was only his horcrux, which was cold comfort. So what if some separate part of him could live on? Could that really be called survival?

He knew there was no point in worrying. If the Dark Lord truly had decided to off him, there was absolutely nothing Harry would be able to do to stop him. There was no magic he could learn in the span of three weeks that would make a single iota of difference.

For this reason, he found himself utterly unmoved by the announcement of a new duelling club. He had half a mind not to go, only Vince of all people had been terribly excited about it. Harry had never seen Vince excited about anything besides his next meal, so he felt it would have been rude not to join him.

That evening, half the school packed themselves into the hall, crowding around a raised platform draped in golden fabric.

"Do you reckon we'll learn any hexes?" Vince was asking Draco from up near the front. He and Goyle had elbowed a path through the crowd, leaving plenty of room for Harry and Draco to follow in their wake.

"Don't be daft," said Draco, puffing out his chest. "Duelling is about strategy and grace."

Vince grunted. "I thought duelling was about taking out the other guy."

"You've confused it with brawling. I don't know why I expected anything else." Draco sniffed and turned his attention back to the stage.

"I thought brawling was…" Vince slammed a fist into his other palm with a meaty thwack, peering at Harry for confirmation.

"I thought so too," Harry whispered, glancing bemusedly at Draco's back.

At this point, Professor Lockhart sauntered onto the stage, and an audible groan passed through the room.

"Figures," Harry muttered. There went any hope of actually learning anything. A scowling Professor Snape arrived next, his expression souring further as Lockhart began to pontificate. At length, they strode to opposite sides of the platform and bowed, though that was perhaps a charitable word for Professor Snape's jerky nod.

The Slytherins cheered as he ended the demonstration duel with a prompt disarming charm that sent Lockhart careening into the wall. Harry leaned forward in interest, wondering whether that had been a variation on the standard charm, or simply something that could be achieved with judicious application of will.

He was a little surprised that Professor Lockhart been taken so off guard. Surely the Dark Lord had not gone so far as to order him not to defend himself? Then again, it had only been the disarming charm, and he was already picking himself up off the floor.

"If I had wanted to stop you it would have been only too easy—however, I felt it would be instructive to let them see…" Lockhart was saying to Snape, whose jaw was so tightly clenched that Harry was expecting to hear a crack any moment.

"Excuse me, Professor, but how does one stop the disarming charm?" Harry asked Lockhart as he hurriedly climbed down from the stage and began to pair students off. The spell travelled quickly enough that it wouldn't be easy to dodge. Harry supposed a shield charm might work, but the shield charm put the caster on the defensive and had to be dropped in order to cast another spell, so he didn't think it would be very good in a one-on-one duel.

Professor Lockhart puffed up. "Ah, that's an advanced technique. Easy enough for somebody of my calibre, of course, but I'm afraid—"

"You interrupt the spellcast with your own spell," came Professor Snape's dour voice from behind them. "The duellist who allows his opponent to complete the spell of his choice unmolested has already lost half the battle. Mr Crabbe, Mr… you. You two. Attempt to disarm each other simultaneously."

Harry stood back from Vince, who suddenly looked nervous. They bowed. Professor Snape counted to three.

Harry whipped his wand forward and sketched a jagged angle through the air, like he was ticking a giant box. " _Expelliarmus!_ "

Vince had hardly brought his wand up. He stared dumbly as a jet of red light arced across the room and sent him stumbling backwards, his wand flying out of his grasp.

"Or in this case, the whole battle," Professor Snape muttered, eyeing Vince critically. He gave Harry a curt nod before turning to supervise another pair.

"Sorry," Harry called out as Vince scrambled to recover his wand, which had rolled dangerously close to the feet of an adjacent group of students. " _Accio_ Vince's wand," he tried. The wand rolled back in their direction, which he counted as a success.

They duelled again. This time, Harry hesitated a little, eager to see what Professor Snape had been talking about. The two disarming charms met in midair, as if magnetised, fizzling into a shower of red sparks. Harry felt his arm jerk, but he was able to keep his grip on his wand. A broad grin stole its way onto his face, only to be wiped away a moment later when Vince's next spell, a stinging hex, nailed him in the shoulder. He could feel it swelling up, itching something fierce, and forced himself to end the duel with another disarming charm.

"Stinging hex, really?" he muttered, rubbing at the irritated skin. Whenever Petri used to cast it on him, it would leave a shiny burn that smarted for a good ten minutes, but didn't swell. The presumably weaker version Vince had hit him with hurt far less, but the itching was almost worse than pain.

Vince shrugged. "Thought I'd change it up. Disarming charm's boring."

Harry supposed he couldn't argue with that, but on the other hand, his offensive repertoire did not exactly seem suited to a friendly duel.

In the next round, he tried the Full Body-Bind curse, discovering the hard way that naturally, a six-syllable curse took longer to cast than the five-syllable disarming charm. All the less savoury spells he knew had even shorter incantations, which he supposed must be by design.

The disarming charm, boring as it might have been, won him four out of five rounds, which he felt spoke well for its utility. He hadn't thought too much of it back when Professor Snape had taught it in Defence while Quirrell had been ill. Now he felt like he would never forget it.

"Again?" Harry asked as a disheartened Vince recovered his wand. Harry frowned. "Maybe we can switch partners?"

They walked over to where Draco was soundly trouncing Goyle. The blond boy cast his spells almost lazily, one arm crossed over his chest and his feet pressed together, like he was giving a recital. He caught Goyle's wand once again and threw it back to him.

"Ready for a taste of the floor?" Draco asked as Harry approached, raising one eyebrow haughtily.

Harry remembered with unease that Draco was under the Dark Lord's imperius curse and had already made an attempt on his life. On his guard, he clenched his fist securely around his wand and snorted. "You wish."

They each took ten steps back. Unlike Draco, Harry kept his feet spread apart, crouching slightly. They bowed, Draco with perfect form and Harry clumsily.

Then, " _Expelliarmus!_ "

" _Serpensortia!_ "

A thin black ribbon of a snake shot out of Draco's wand and was promptly blasted into the air by the disarming charm. It landed in a displeased coil, writhing every which way.

Draco hadn't cast anything else, eyes fixed on the snake he had conjured, so Harry cast the disarming charm again and sent him toppling to the ground.

"I win," Harry declared. He glanced back down. The snake was gone. To their left came a high-pitched scream. It was Lockhart, stumbling backwards as the confused snake wound underfoot. Professor Snape, who was on the other side of the room, crossed it at a leisurely pace, clearly in no hurry to alleviate Lockhart's suffering.

Despite his loss, Draco was laughing silently, one hand over his mouth as he dusted himself off.

"Look at that milksop," he said, dropping his hand and smirking at Harry. His face fell suddenly. "But you—you're not afraid of snakes then? You just ignored it."

Harry shrugged. "I like snakes. They're really very silly animals," he said, thinking of Shy's ridiculous runespoor with the cone on one of its heads.

"Silly?" Draco demanded, straightening up. "Snakes are noble creatures, deserving of respect."

Harry just grinned at him. "Silly," he insisted.

On their right, Vince and Goyle hadn't noticed anything amiss and were still going at each other with a variety of minor hexes that were most certainly not the disarming charm. Vince had a pulsing boil coming grotesquely off his nose and Goyle's eyebrows had grown past his chin. Of course, neither of them knew the counterspells to what they had cast, so they had to endure until the end of the club and face Professor Snape's sneering wrath as he sorted them out.

"That was fun," Harry told Vince as they exited the hall. He felt much more cheerful than he had going in, even though intellectually he knew that being able to win a duel against his yearmates meant nothing for his survival potential. Still, the idea of fighting for his life had gone from a nebulous horror to something more concrete, something exhilarating, even. If he was going to duel to the death, it was better to enjoy it than to suffer, right?

Harry was one of the few male students to appear again at the following week's meeting of the duelling club. The consensus among boys was that Lockhart was a disgusting fraud and Snape an unforgiving taskmaster. Luckily, the former was mitigated by the latter, as the first thing Professor Snape did was stun Lockhart and leave him collapsed on the ground. Seeing this, half the attending students fled the hall in disappointment, leaving much more room for Harry and the rest. Oddly enough, they were all Slytherins.

"As you can see, the stunning spell is an efficient means of disabling your enemies, as it renders them unconscious," Professor Snape said. "Regrettably, the effect is not permanent and will wear off after some time. The incantation is _stupefy_."

Three syllables, Harry thought. Very nice. Professor Snape demonstrated the wand movement, a helix that ended on a down swing, as if one were slinging a stone.

Gemma raised her hand. "Professor, how do we stop the spell if someone is attacking us?"

"The stunning spell is a hex," Professor Snape said, demonstrating the spell again on Lockhart's prone form, which jerked as the bolt of red light slammed into his side. "Unlike jinxes and many curses, it is an aimed projectile which is simple to dodge, as long as you are not taken unawares. While your opponent is foolishly casting the stunning spell, you may prepare a more effective attack. The disarming charm, for instance."

"Are you saying that we shouldn't use the stunning spell then, sir?" asked Pansy Parkinson.

"No Miss Parkinson, I have said no such thing. Duelling is as much a mind game as it is one of magical prowess. A spell that would be appropriate in one situation may prove to be a fatal mistake in another. Carrow! When would be an ideal time to use the stunning spell?"

Snape pointed at a sallow-faced Slytherin who was standing to another, seemingly identical girl. Carrow thought in silence for a few moments before she said, "When you're really close, or when the other person's running away."

"I should hope that none of you will be seen running away from a formal duel," Snape drawled, earning hesitant titters around the room. "There is always the option to forfeit. But you are correct, Carrow, that the stunning spell and other hexes of its class are most effective at close range."

Professor Snape paired everybody off just like last time, and Harry ended up across from Parkinson. They bowed to each other and promptly exchanged disarming charms. Harry managed to get a second one off slightly quicker than his opponent, and her wand went sailing into the air. He frowned, wondering if there might be a more efficient spell to transition into. The disarming charm ended with an upward stroke. If he could bring it back down—that was it—the stunning spell's helical wand movement was perfect.

Parkinson retrieved her wand and they started again.

" _Expelliarmus! Stupefy!_ " Harry shouted, and to his gratification the stunning spell manifested from his wand as a strong red bolt. Parkinson dodged it with a shriek, recovering quickly enough to meet his next disarming charm with her own. They both paused for a confused second, surprised at having lasted so long, then repeated the same spells, only this time Parkinson managed to complete her disarming charm while Harry's stunning spell missed, losing him the duel.

"Professor Snape was right after all," she said smugly. Harry grimaced. Professor Snape had indeed been right—duelling was a mind game. If he could only repeat the same patterns, no matter how efficient they were, he would become predictable and therefore easily countered.

Sunday morning saw him in an empty classroom, sketching wand movements through the air to find convenient transition spells. The disarming charm was frustratingly irregular and did not fit well with anything else he knew besides the stunning spell. He remembered Professor Quirrell—or perhaps the Dark Lord—had mentioned that the Enemy's Curse was a good opening spell. It was four syllables and a much more straightforward wand movement to the disarming charm's five and awkward angle, so would probably be more difficult to disrupt. On the other hand, there were conjurations like _serpensortia_ which both disrupted charms and constituted a physical threat, which could waste the opponent's time.

Harry thought about how the Dark Lord had duelled Dumbledore and the teachers in his body. He had alternated _crucio_ and _avada kedavra,_ with some unknown nonverbal spells sprinkled in between. Predictable didn't matter when you were deadly, he supposed. But the sheer mental precision required to cast vastly different spells in quick succession was mind-boggling to Harry. He could only switch from the disarming charm to the stunning spell and back twice before he risked a sloppy wand movement or insufficient focus.

Practice was what he needed.

Over the last three weeks of term, Harry focused on duelling with an almost single-minded obsession, neglecting even charms club. Penelope was on leave from extracurricular responsibilities and Gabriel was an all right leader, but the spells they learned there just didn't matter. Harry knew that, in the end, his burgeoning duelling skills did not matter either, but they were like straw thatching over the yawning pit of his dread, hiding it from view until he had almost convinced himself that there was a way across. His friends had no idea what had come over him, and he could find no words to explain himself, but at least Vince was happy enough to duel him repeatedly without asking too many questions.

Despite Harry's worries, or perhaps even because of them, time passed swiftly and he soon found himself packing his trunk in preparation for departure. The dementors hovering just beyond the morning mist over Hogsmeade station did nothing to help his nerves. This time, at least, they did not venture near the train.

When they reached King's Cross, Petri was thankfully there to meet him. Accompanying him was an unfamiliar man in rather threadbare robes that looked like they'd been mended ten times too many. He had an equally well-worn broomstick, of a model Harry did not recognise, tucked under his arm.

"Harry, this is Remus Lupin, a friend of Dumbledore's," Petri said without so much as a hello. "He'll be escorting us home."

Harry eyed the broomstick. "We're flying?"

Petri grimaced. "Flight is secure and difficult to trace, assuming the proper precautions are taken. Unfortunately, it seems that Dumbledore was unable to secure another ministry car."

"Albus has been quite busy lately," said Lupin. Harry had to agree—he hadn't seen Dumbledore at the head table for some time, even though he was sure the headmaster had remained at the school.

Petri ignored him entirely and gestured for Harry to come to his side. He bent down and whispered in his ear, almost inaudibly, "Ein Werwolf. Sei vorsichtig."

Harry eyed the apparent werewolf Lupin, but couldn't find any indication that he was anything more than a sleep-deprived wizard. What was he even supposed to be careful of?

They followed Lupin to the very end of the platform, past where the train ended, where Harry was shocked to see a thestral tied to a pillar. It stood there placidly, flicking its stringy tail now and then. As they approached, it snorted and shook itself, its reins jingling merrily. Lupin reached into his robe pocket and produced a chunk of raw meat, which he held out. In a flash, the thestral snapped up the treat, lowering its reptilian head and chewing noisily.

"It'd be best if Harry rode with me," Lupin said.

Petri cut him off. "Out of the question."

"The broom won't be very manoeuvrable with two riders. It's a poor defensive position," Lupin insisted.

Petri ground his teeth, apparently thinking furiously.

"You can't ride the thestral then?" Harry asked Petri. Lupin turned towards him, but then looked around in confusion, as if searching for something.

"Thestrals dislike me," Petri said. "Remus, how do you propose to protect Harry when you cannot even look at him?"

Lupin fixed his gaze back on Petri's sneering face and said, gently, "Perhaps you can tell me the secret, then? I admit, using the _fidelius_ charm like this is an ingenious idea, but it makes things rather inconvenient."

"I don't trust you," Petri said bluntly.

Lupin looked away. "I suppose that's fair. We hardly know each other. But surely, you trust Albus—"

Petri laughed briefly, before his face grew stony. "The broom," he said, holding his hand out. "Harry will ride with me. You can take his luggage."

Lupin bit his lip but relented, passing the broom to Petri, who positioned it at waist height and swung his leg over the handle. Harry handed over his trunk before climbing on in front of him, yelping as Petri's wand struck his crown and something cold and slick slid down the back of his neck. The disillusionment charm. He tried waving his hand in front of his face, but there wasn't any distortion. He sighed. One day, his charmwork would be that good.

"Do you really think someone will try to attack me?" Harry asked.

"Somebody has already tried, or have you forgotten so quickly? The Dark Lord has ordered your death," Petri said.

"What?" Harry demanded. "How do you know that?"

"Dumbledore's spies."

"Dumbledore has spies?" Harry whispered in a high voice. He supposed he shouldn't be surprised.

Ahead of them, Lupin had mounted the thestral, which was unfurling its leathery wings. With one powerful sweep, it launched itself silently into the air and out of the train tunnel. Petri grunted and kicked off. They rose after its rapidly diminishing form, the broom shuddering and struggling to keep pace. Harry wondered uncharitably whether it would have been better if he had taken the handle.

They ascended almost vertically for several minutes until they broke through the clouds. Harry didn't think he had ever been this high up on a broom. Despite the speed and altitude, the charms on the broom kept them relatively warm and insulated from the wind.

"So how come Lupin's here with you?" Harry shouted.

"To navigate with the thestral, and as 'protection,'" Petri said in his ear with an audible sneer.

"Why didn't you just send Silviu again?"

Petri snorted. "In case it has escaped your notice, our landlord is colluding with the Dark Lord."

"So what?" said Harry, refusing to acknowledge the sting of anxiety in his chest. He had forgotten. "He doesn't know I'm Harry Potter. And he likes me."

Now he felt a twinge of guilt at the thought. How much of Silviu's fondness was real, and how much was because of what Harry had changed?

"That may be the case, but the Dark Lord himself knows who you are," Petri said. "You remember, don't you, that your possessed professor was able to recognise you?"

"Of course I do," Harry muttered.

Was this confirmation that Lord Voldemort was truly trying to kill him now? Or was this still the same sort of pretend, indirect attempted murder as before? Dumbledore had said not to play one's cards too early. But did that mean Harry should pretend that he didn't know that Voldemort _wasn't_ trying to kill him, or pretend that he didn't even know that he _was_? Was Voldemort trying to lull him into a false sense of security? If so, it wasn't working at all, because he was terrified. He groaned as he felt his mind twisting into unlikely shapes.

They couldn't have been in the air longer than ten minutes before they started to descend. Harry supposed that the station wasn't that far from Diagon Alley. One moment, they were approaching a roiling mass of clouds from above, and the next they were looking down at a haphazard network of crooked buildings and winding roads that seemed to drop off into a blue abyss of sky. Harry almost twisted his neck as he looked up—there were the clouds, far above them—what had just happened?

"We're passing into expanded space," Petri explained. When Harry looked down again, the ground and other buildings had sprouted seamlessly into place at the edges of wizarding London. They skimmed over the black shingles of a row of Knockturn Alley rooftops before lighting down in the familiar grass of the graveyard.

Harry stumbled as he climbed off the broom, unused to his invisible legs. "Can you take off the charm now?" he asked.

"Not yet," said Petri. "Wait until we're inside. By the way, here."

Petri stuck his wand into his pocket and a slip of parchment shot out. He snatched it out of the air and held his hand out in Harry's approximate direction. Harry took it, trying not to roll his eyes at this excessive use of the summoning charm.

"Joachim Petris Sarg befindet sich in der Knockturngasse 66 / D-12," read the parchment in unfamiliar, blocky handwriting. As he read it, a sudden realisation bloomed almost tangibly in his head. He rubbed his temple as he looked up and found that they were standing right in front of their coffin plot.

"You put the _fidelius_ charm on the coffin?" he demanded, but Petri wasn't paying him any mind.

Lupin had landed some metres away from them and was patting the thestral and feeding it more raw meat. Harry spotted his trunk at the man's feet. He made to go get it, but before he could, Petri raised his wand and summoned the trunk into his hand. He passed it to Harry with a muttered, "Go inside and you can cancel the disillusionment."

Harry slotted his circular house key into the coffin lid. It clicked open. He took one last glance back to where Petri and Lupin were now conversing inaudibly before reining in his curiosity and descending into their home.

His jaw dropped as he filled the jar at the bottom of the stairs with bluebell flames, illuminating the interior. The space had been totally transformed. It was bigger by at least a whole metre in every direction, and one of the long counters from inside the trunk seemed to have been moved into the main room, along with a pair of bookshelves. The centre slab of the kitchen table had been removed, leaving it circular and compact, and the beds were nowhere to be found. Ducking through the curtain into the bathroom, Harry discovered that it had been expanded into a much larger room, with the toilet separated from the beds by two heavy wooden screens.

Harry set his trunk down by his bed and rendered himself visible again before wandering back into the other room. He peered curiously at the mess on the counter. There were papers strewn about haphazardly, some of them on the floor, but instead of some glass contraption as Harry would have expected, there was wood of all sorts laid out, including what appeared to be a tree branch cut from one of the yew trees outside.

"What's all this?" he asked as Petri came down the stairs with an irritable look. His expression lightened as he glanced over.

"Oh, I've been experimenting with wand-making again," he said.

Harry remembered the fake wand Petri had made with the phoenix feather that Mrs Figg had given him, as well as the strange wand he had made for Rosenkol. "How does it work?" he asked.

"In the end, it's just a very complex enchantment," Petri said, depositing a handful of long, coarse hairs on the counter. Were those from the thestral? "I'm still working on the finer details, but I can create a crudely functioning wand for casting charms now. Are you interested in assisting me with testing?"

Harry was interested, but he wasn't about to just agree without knowing the details. "What would I have to do?"

"Cast a variety of spells and compare the performance to your own wand," Petri said.

"All right," Harry said. That sounded simple enough. "By the way, where did you get my wand?" Harry asked. "You didn't buy it for me, did you? Did it used to belong to somebody else?"

Petri nodded. "It used to be Horst's."

"Horst. Your second apprentice?" Harry asked. The one who had been kissed by a dementor. He stared down at his wand, which felt suddenly heavier.

"Yes," said Petri.

"Can you tell me about him?" The only one of his predecessors Harry really knew anything about was Ulrich, and that was only from their brief conversation during the one instance when he had been conjured with his personality intact.

"What do you wish to know?" Petri asked.

Harry thought about it for a moment, and said, "How did he become your apprentice? And how long—I mean, when did he die? What did he look like?"

" _Imaginis_ ," Petri said, conjuring a ghostly illusion with his wand. Harry blinked in surprise at the resulting apparition—tall and thin, with thick eyebrows and a curled goatee that did nothing to disguise his weak chin. For some reason, Harry had always imagined Horst as a teenager, but this was clearly a grown man.

"Horst and I met when he tried to rob my shop," Petri began, his lip curling, almost in fond reminiscence. "He was a typical lowlife, had left Durmstrang to work for a local ring of dark arts dealers. They knew to stay away from my shop, but I suppose they'd neglected to inform poor Horst. When he attempted to threaten me, naturally I enslaved him with the imperius curse right away."

Right, naturally, Harry thought.

"It turned out that he had hidden talent, however. He broke free of my curse after several months, and instead of running away, begged me to teach him the dark arts. As he'd already been assisting me with preparations, I accepted. Horst proved himself to be extremely capable… it's a great pity that he chose to die."

"Chose to die?" Harry repeated. "I thought he was kissed?"

"Yes. We often speak of the dementor's kiss as if it were the worst thing that could ever happen to somebody. Probably, it is. But when you spend a long time in the presence of dementors, a change overtakes you. Life seems dreadful, bland to the most terrible degree, and you become curious. You want to know what it's like to be dead. Not dead and gone, but dead and still whole, possessed of your mind but stripped of your will," Petri paused, blinking and running his fingers through his greying hair. "It's difficult to understand without first-hand experience, but that's what happened to Horst."

"There were dementors at school," Harry said suddenly. "I think I get what you mean by being curious. That's how they are, right? Extremely curious."

Petri's face twisted slowly into consternation. "Dementors at school," he finally said. "Why were there dementors at school?"

"They were guarding the school in case any of the Azkaban escapees showed up," Harry said.

"And who was guarding the students against them?" Petri demanded.

"Well they weren't literally in the school," Harry said hurriedly. "Just at the gates and in the forest. I… may have gone into the forest at one point and seen them."

"Seen them," Petri repeated dryly. "Did they try to communicate with you?"

"Communicate?" Harry asked, playing dumb. Petri saw right through him. He reached out, grabbed Harry by the shoulders, and pressed his face up to his temple.

"Communicate," he murmured, the stubble on his chin tickling Harry's nose.

"Yeah," Harry admitted. "Is that bad?"

Petri released him and sighed. There was an incredulous crinkle in the corner of his eye. "Since you're still alive, I assume it went well. You must have impressed them somehow."

"I suppose," Harry said, thinking of what the Dark Lord had done. He rubbed his arm.

"They will remember you now. First impressions are very important with dementors, so I hope you made it clear to them that they have more to gain from aiding you than eating you," Petri said. "Perhaps this is good. No doubt they'll flock to the Dark Lord's side as soon as he bothers to ask them. If they know you as another ally, it will be more difficult for him to convince them to turn on you."

"I only met a few of them, though," Harry said. Petri blinked at him in confusion for a moment before his lip quirked up in understanding.

"All dementors share the same knowledge. If you meet even one, you have met them all," he explained.

"Oh," Harry said. A concerning thought came to him. What if he hadn't made a good impression on the dementors after all? They didn't have eyes—when Lord Voldemort had possessed him, had the dementors simply sensed him instead of Harry? He didn't feel as if he could say all this to Petri, so he said instead, "Why is it important for them to like me? They're related to conjuration, right?"

"Yes. They are essential for sustained conjuration. They provide—what is the word—storage. By borrowing their magic, you can save a conjuration for later, so to speak, instead of being forced to start from the beginning each time."

Harry nodded. That seemed to agree with the archaic book on dementors and rising stones from the restricted section.

"Will you start teaching me conjuration?" Harry asked.

"Eager, aren't you? Very well. Show me your _imaginis, cantato,_ and _comprimo_ ," Petri said.

Suddenly nervous, Harry wiped his palms on his robes and brandished his wand. He could do this. " _Imaginis_."

The image of Nearly-Headless Nick appeared, comically sized at Harry's height but with the original proportions. There was still an opaque cone of light revealing Harry's wand as the source, but the illusion was leaps and bounds ahead of his original attempts.

Petri nodded wordlessly.

Harry felt some relief at that. " _Cantato,_ " he said next. Furrowing his brows with concentration, he held the image of Nick steady and added in the movement of the mouth, the pompous but genial tone—"My name is Sir Nicholas de Mimsy Porpington."

Petri's eyebrows rose into his hairline and the corner of his lip twitched. "Fine," he said.

" _Comprimo_ ," Harry concluded. His eyes hurt from his unblinking exertion of will. Petri reached out and touched the illusion. His hand stopped at Nick's chest for a moment. Then he pressed harder, and his arm went through it.

Struck by sudden disappointment, Harry lost concentration and the whole thing dissolved into a beam of light with a bang. Petri flinched back, wand suddenly in hand, before he came to his senses and lowered it.

"Adequate," he concluded, and Harry let out the breath he had been holding. "You will not be needing _comprimo_ for now, in any case. It is best to start with a surface."

Petri reached under the table and swung his trunk up on top of it. With two turns of the key he opened it up to the compartment full of glass objects and selected a simple hand mirror, which he passed to Harry.

"The aim of conjuration is first to retrieve the memory of a dead person, and second to convince it to operate as if it were still alive," Petri began, pulling up a chair and gesturing for Harry to sit down at the table. "To understand what exactly it is that we are doing, we will require a little bit of theory first. While we are alive and awake, every thought, every feeling we have leaves a magical imprint. These imprints are tied to us, inaccessible to others except by some specific, invasive means, until we die. When we die, those imprints are all still there, remembered by magic, and they can be accessed exactly as any form's properties are accessed for transfiguration. You have studied transfiguration forms at school?"

Harry nodded, screwing up his face as he tried to retrieve the definition. "Some. Something's form is like the ideal version of it that we imagine when we say its name."

"Ah yes, you have mentioned a key point—our imagination. Ordinary magic that captures a deceased person's image relies on the caster's imagination. Speaking portraits, for example, are painted while the artist interviews the sitter and so gets a proper impression of their personality. The other sort of conjuration is not like that. You need know only enough about the target to identify them. This is possible because we cheat, in a way. We capture the so-called soul, which is the singular form itself, and thus has all the knowledge that we lack," Petri said.

"A soul is a form? Dumbledore told me one time that the soul is our grasp of who we are. Does that mean the same thing?" Harry asked.

Petri sniffed, wrinkling his nose. "You could say that, yes, for the living. But who, exactly, will be grasping anything while dead? What about when asleep?"

Harry frowned. He supposed that was an obvious complication of that definition.

"I would say that the dead soul is more like a category. At any given time there are memories and thoughts which belong to it, and others which do not. Awareness is not required. Awareness can only be supplied by will, which belongs to the living," Petri said. "Anyway, for more practical purposes, whether or not the soul and form are the same thing, we are interested in the form, so that is what I will call it. Have you distinguished between deep and shallow transfiguration in lessons yet?"

Harry shook his head, dismayed, but Petri took it in stride.

"Perhaps that is an advanced topic. All you need to know is that a transfiguration is deep when no matter how you divide up the transfigured object, that is, how _deeply_ you cut, no trace of the original object remains. A deep transfiguration is a perfect instantiation of a form. Do you understand?"

"Yes, that makes sense," Harry said. The only time he had thought much about what the inside of a transfiguration looked like was that one afternoon in the Hogwarts kitchens, when Nelly had shown him the elves' food transfiguration. It hadn't occurred to him that some apparently successful transfigurations, perhaps even most of his own, did not completely permeate an object.

Petri continued, "Here is where we cheat. Obviously, if we could do a deep conjuration, that would be equivalent to retrieving the entire form. But it is effectively impossible to conjure any human out of thin air, let alone a fully-functional one. What we can instead do is conjure a derivative concept—the ghost of a person, or their reflection."

He gestured to the hand mirror.

"You see, a person's reflection cannot be said to exist as an object. It simply results from that person interacting with a mirror. If we want to conjure a perfect reflection in the glass, one that can behave exactly like the real thing, then we must have something to reflect, yes? So even though we have only done enough magic to produce an image in a mirror, we in fact have the entire form in our hands, with no need to produce blood, flesh, and bone."

"That's it?" Harry could not help asking. Conjuring an image in a mirror—that hardly seemed nefarious. "And this is dark magic?"

Petri blinked. "Of course it's not dark magic," he said, laughing. "It hurts no one. It is preserving the conjuration that is dark. The reflection method as it is does not produce anything more useful than an enchanted portrait. You will usually want to bring back the dead more literally, and for this you will need a functional human body. Unless you are suicidal, this requires some… volunteer to offer. Preferably two others so that they do not die as quickly."

"Why would they die?" Harry asked. "It didn't hurt me when you conjured Ulrich with my blood, did it?"

"Ulrich is a special case—normally you will not conveniently have the reanimated original body available, so the conjuration will effectively be possessing someone. Having been a victim of possession yourself, surely it is clear to you why this is bad for one's health?" said Petri.

Harry blinked. "Actually, could you still explain it? Dumbledore said that having the wrong soul in a body strains it somehow, but I didn't completely understand how. And when the Dark Lord possessed me I honestly don't think there were any side effects."

Petri furrowed his brow. "After several weeks of possession you should have been suffering from anaemia at the very least. Nothing can be ordinary with you, can it?"

"I didn't ask for it. I wish I could just be normal," Harry muttered.

"You do not," said Petri. "If you were normal, you would have died as a baby."

Harry supposed he couldn't contradict that.

"For a normal person, the body and its form are always acting upon each other. Changes to the body, if not soon reversed, become part of the form, and changes to the form become reflected on the body. During a possession, two forms are exerting themselves on the body, with the foreign spirit constantly attempting to enact a transfiguration and the original owner resisting it. Sometimes this leads to a partial transfiguration or to gruesome transmogrifications, such as additional body parts appearing in unlikely locations. Even if nothing so dramatic occurs, so much magic acting on the body constantly will cause parts of it to die, starting with the blood," Petri explained. "I cannot imagine why this did not happen with you and the Dark Lord. Perhaps he has developed some way of restraining the effect of his form."

This couldn't be true, Harry thought, because Professor Quirrell had been affected quite badly by the Dark Lord's possession, exactly as Petri had described.

Still, he said, "Maybe. Okay. So possession is bad for you. But it's fine to just conjure someone and then let them go after… how long? A few minutes? Hours?"

"Under an hour should be safe," Petri said. "However, a successful conjuration may take you days or even weeks to prepare, so such a short time generally seems inadequate. If you have spare bodies ready, you might hold the conjuration for weeks or months. Alternatively, you can use a dementor's magic to preserve the form and conjure it when needed with no further preparation. To begin with, you will be practising on Ulrich to gain a good understanding of the spell. I believe the experience will help you later when you attempt a full conjuration from start to finish."

Petri paused, as if remembering something. "Do you still have that headless ghost that you wrote me about?"

Harry nodded, wondering at the random question. "He's in my trunk."

"Good. It will be invaluable for helping you link a conjuration to a body," Petri said.

"How?" Harry asked.

"There is an enormous amount of information stored inside a ghost about how a body should behave, things you would normally be forced to spell manually using _erudito_ , as a conjuration rarely includes that information naturally. With a headless ghost, you can conveniently omit the head so that your conjuration's identity doesn't get confused. There's an added advantage of extra resentment," Petri paused. "Have I taught you about resentment?"

"Maybe a little," Harry hedged, knowing full well that Petri hadn't. "It's related to how strong a ghost is?"

Petri shrugged. "It's literally what you'd expect from resentment—lingering indignation at having been wronged. Magic fueled by resentment is especially suitable for going against the natural order of things, such as restoring the dead."

"But if you use the ghost's resentment up, it'll disappear?" Harry asked.

"Yes, unfortunately. One use only," Petri confirmed with a regretful look. That wasn't exactly what Harry had been concerned about, but he supposed it answered his question. He bit his lip. Ghosts weren't conscious—Dumbledore had told him that, so it was all right, wasn't it? He wished he had checked out the book that the headmaster had recommended. With all the extracurricular duelling occupying him, the matter had slipped his mind.

Petri set the trunk on the floor and turned the key twice in the lock, opening it again to reveal a drop into a familiar chamber. Harry followed him down into the workshop, where Petri took a grey pebble from a drawer and held it gingerly between two fingers.

"This is the resurrection stone to which I have bound Ulrich's form. Take it in your left hand," Petri instructed. Harry held out his hand. "Turn the stone over at the same time as you cast the spell, once per repetition. The mantra is _spiritus revocatur_ , or simply _spiritus_ if you prefer a faster repetition, and the wand movement is a trefoil knot."

"Sorry, a what?" Harry interrupted, blinking at the unfamiliar term.

Petri demonstrated briefly. At a casual glance, it almost looked like an ordinary circular motion, but there was a slant to his wrist and Harry could see after a few repetitions that the wand tip reached three distinct extremes. He bit his lip as he tried to copy the movement clumsily. It was unlike any spell he had attempted before.

"As you traverse each loop, consider the mind, body, and identity of the one you are conjuring. The stone holds the form, but you must still do the work to draw it out," Petri said. He helpfully propped the mirror up on the table.

Clearing his throat, Harry held up the stone and his wand and began.

" _Spiritus revocatur… spiritus recovatur_ ," he murmured, beginning slowly as he tried to keep his wand movement in the proper conformation. He could feel himself reddening as he realised he had forgotten to turn the stone. At that very moment, he thought he could fully sympathise with Vince's struggle to do two things at once.

It took some time to get used to the motions, but by the time his mouth ran dry he felt he had ingrained them into his muscle memory. The problem was that the shimmering image of Ulrich that would form in the glass was just that—an image. Ulrich's reflection was not the same concept as the image of Ulrich's face in the glass. Harry knew that intellectually, but found it impossible to understand what physical difference there could be. The true Ulrich remained frustratingly out of reach.

"I do not expect you to make substantial progress in just these few weeks, let alone one evening," Petri told him after he returned to find Harry still struggling at the task. Harry didn't know for sure how much time had passed, but by the ache in his eye sockets and the stiffness in his knees he wagered it must be deep into the night.

He wedged his thumb underneath his glasses to rub at the corner of his eye, sighing. "I feel like I know what I should be doing, but I just can't do it," he muttered. "You're sure I can do it, right? It doesn't take a lot of magic?"

Petri gestured to the mirror. "You have seen for yourself that you can handle enough magic to conjure the image. It is simply a difficult spell because of its precise requirements. I doubt you have had to cast any other spell before where metaphysical identity matters."

Harry frowned as he suddenly remembered something random—Patil, summoning Luna's shoes without ever having seen them. "The summoning charm," he said. "Sorry. I just thought maybe identity matters for it too."

"It does," Petri agreed. "But it isn't exactly difficult to conceptualise the identity of something you can see."

As if to demonstrate, he summoned the hand mirror from the table. It slowed as it approached, falling easily into Petri's outstretched hand.

"But you can summon things you've never seen before," Harry said. "Sixth-series summoning. I saw somebody do it."

Petri's lip curled. "One can, yes. Can you?"

Harry frowned. "Should I practise the summoning charm, then? Do you think it would be easier?"

Petri laughed. "You are welcome to begin the summoning series, but it would be a very roundabout way of learning conjuration, if it helps at all. Practice is the most direct route, and likely the best use of our limited time. But rest is also important. You can continue trying tomorrow."

Harry grunted and held out the stone, which Petri took and put back in its place.

"I don't remember you using the stone last time," Harry said.

"It isn't strictly necessary to hold it," Petri explained. "Proximity is enough, but the closer you are the, easier it is."

"Can you conjure Ulrich again, to show me? Maybe the problem is that I don't know him that well. I've only talked to him the once," Harry said.

Petri hummed. "Perhaps. Tomorrow."

This was when Harry discovered that it was nearly three in the morning, and that by 'tomorrow,' Petri was referring to the next evening. Resolving to get back to a nocturnal schedule in one go, Harry forced himself to stay up, though he accepted that he was in no mental shape to be doing any more spell practice.

"I'm going to get some air," Harry said as they climbed out of the trunk. He grabbed his cloak. After months in the draughty halls of Hogwarts, the windowless coffin felt horribly stuffy.

"Don't leave the graveyard," Petri said.

"Right. Wasn't planning to," Harry muttered, a little annoyed. He seriously doubted that it mattered where he went—unless he stayed shut up in the fidelius-charmed coffin, the Dark Lord or Death Eaters could just as easily kidnap him from inside the graveyard as outside of it.

"Hey, Harry!" someone called out the moment he popped outside, startling him badly. He tripped over the edge of the coffin and landed on his face. His glasses stabbed into the bridge of his nose.

"Ouch, kid, you all right? Sorry if I scared you," glowing green eyes blinked out of the darkness as Harry looked up, his nose throbbing. It was Shy. He almost relaxed, and then remembered Petri's concerns about Silviu working with the Dark Lord.

Forget that. For all Harry knew, he himself was still working with the Dark Lord. He pulled himself to his feet using the nearest headstone and dusted himself off, though he palmed his wand, just in case.

"Oh, hello Shy. I'm fine," he murmured, floundering for something to say. Finally, he settled on, "What are you doing out here?"

Shy's eyes slimmed to pleased crescents. "Gardening! Sanguini gave me a cutting from his venomous tentacula. You know Sanguini, right, from B Thirteen?" She pointed off to the left, where Harry could barely make out the hulking figure of an enormous, spiky plant. Then Shy pointed to her own plot, where a clay pot with a single wiggling tentacle sat askew atop a mound of dirt.

"I haven't met him, sorry. I don't get out much. That's a carnivorous plant, right?" Harry said, eyeing the tentacula.

Shy nodded. "It's sort of like a snake. Or a bunch of snakes, really. It swallows prey whole, it's got venomous fangs, and it's cute. Also, the venom of a mature tentacula is supposed to be super potent—it's a magical toxin. They apparently use it in dragon tranquilisers. I'm hoping to make some for my shop."

Harry nodded, eyeing the plant a little nervously. It seemed like the sort of terror that belonged in Greenhouse Three at Hogwarts. "That makes sense. I've been wondering—don't take this the wrong way, but how come you have a poison shop? I mean, isn't it sort of… dubious for someone to buy poison?"

Shy laughed. "Don't worry. I thought it was mad at first too—corner shop where you can just pick up cobra venom? It turns out magical folks are pretty hard to kill with regular poisons. Only magical poisons, like in these tentacula, will do anything to you lot, and even then you've got a fair chance. The poisons I sell are mostly supposed to be ingredients in potions, which I assume end up non-poisonous…" She scratched her head. "You can probably make stronger poisons out of them to murder people with, too, but it's not my problem if my customers get arrested. Well actually, it is, because then they wouldn't come back, but you know, at least I don't get arrested too."

Harry couldn't help quirking his lip at this. "Yeah, I hear Azkaban's chilly this time of year."

"Ha! That it is. But enough about me. What about you? You back from school for Christmas?" Shy asked.

Harry nodded. "Just got home earlier today."

"And how long will you be around for?" Shy asked.

"Two weeks," Harry said. "Term starts up again on the fourth, I think."

Shy grinned, accidentally flashing her fangs. "Great, that's plenty of time. You've got to come around my shop again to see my new king cobra. He's massive and he's got these really pretty gold chevrons. I've named him Harry, after you. Sorry if that's strange."

"I'm… flattered, I suppose," Harry said, a little taken aback. Did Shy really know him well enough to be naming a snake after him? They were really just casually acquainted neighbours, weren't they? Then again, Harry thought guiltily, they were also supposed to be the vampire equivalent of siblings.

There was also no way he was going to convince Petri to let him go to Shy's shop, which was literally full of poison, whatever assurances she had just given about its legality. He frowned. She hadn't made any explicit invitation yet. Perhaps he would simply deflect until the time came for him to return to Hogwarts.

"You don't know how much you changed my life, Harry," Shy was telling him, still grinning. "Snake language is just brilliant. They really listen to it! If they're not eating, I can just tell them 'food,' and bam, suddenly they go for a rat they've been ignoring for ages. I need you to teach me another one, I mean, if you're up for it. How do you say, 'get in the bin?'"

Harry blinked. "Get in the bin?" he repeated, in English.

"Yeah, so I can give them their baths. Some of them like the water but the others try to pop out as soon as I drop them in. It's annoying," Shy explained.

So Harry licked his lips, imagined a snake, and said the phrase.

Shy repeated after him. "Inside the hole," she seemed to say. Harry blinked.

"Close enough," he told her. What she had said before sparked his curiosity. "Are you saying that snakes always do what you say, when you talk to them in Parseltongue?"

Shy screwed up her face in thought, before nodding. "Yeah, I reckon that's right. It works every time."

Glancing around, though he wasn't sure what he was checking for, Harry took out his wand and muttered, " _Serpensortia!_ " There was a bang and something flopped onto the dirt.

Shy leapt back. "Oi! Did you just magic up a snake?"

Harry was busy straining his eyes in search of his wayward conjuration, which had slithered off to parts unknown. "Come back, snake," he said, hoping it was Parseltongue that had come out. There was a susurration in the icy, brittle grass and a tiny black head popped to attention.

"Sorry, should have warned you," Harry said to Shy.

"What sort of snake is it?" she asked, bending down and reaching out. In an expert manoeuvre she hooked it with a finger and had it writhing around both hands in a moment. "I don't recognise it. Looks sort of like a grass snake except it hasn't got any yellow on its neck."

"Probably not a real kind of snake," Harry said, scratching his head and thinking about what form he had been considering. "I suppose it's some generic snake."

Shy blinked at him. "A generic snake," she repeated, lifting the snake up to peer at its underside. It wound curiously about her fingers. "Seems pretty real to me."

"It won't last too long, I don't think," Harry warned her. "It'll vanish after a while. I just wanted to test what you said."

He held out his hand and asked for the snake to come to him. It slithered easily from Shy to him. He frowned. "I don't know if it works because of Parseltongue, or because I conjured it."

"You can try on my real snakes later," Shy said.

With a sucking sound and a faint puff of smoke, the conjured snake disappeared. Harry shrugged and pocketed his wand.

"What other things do you learn at magic school?" Shy asked. "Can you turn people into toads?"

"I think that's rather advanced," Harry said.

"But it's possible?" Shy pressed.

Harry nodded. "I think so."

"Blimey, I really better not get on the wrong side of a wizard." Shy leaned forward and put her hand up to the side of her face, stage whispering, "Don't tell him I said this, but it's a good thing the chairman isn't all that good with that wand of his."

"He isn't?" Harry asked, unconvinced. He'd seen Silviu manage some pretty advanced magic.

"All he can do is make tablecloths and wipe memories," Shy said, rolling her eyes. "Seems like a waste of effort to use wizard magic for that when you can do the same thing with your eyes. Not the tablecloths, I suppose, but honestly that doesn't seem that useful."

"How does your eye magic work?" Harry asked.

"You just look really hard, like you're trying to see through someone," Shy said. "Want to try it out?"

Harry grunted in the back of his throat, unwilling to consent outright. On the one hand, it seemed dangerous. On the other hand, legilimency seemed very useful.

"Since we're company, we should be able to connect both ways even though you're still human. Maybe it'll work better if I give you some blood first," Shy said, and before Harry could voice protest, bit herself on her forearm.

The scent struck him instantly, as if blown by a gust of wind, though the night was still. A sweet haze clung to his palate. His mouth watered. Shy stuck out her arm. Harry stared up at her, dumbfounded.

"What, never licked a girl before?" she asked, waggling her eyebrows. Harry blushed from head to toe. "Come on, before it gets cold."

He'd never licked anybody, because that was gross. Despite this thought, he didn't feel disgusted, only vaguely thirsty. He leaned forward and swiped his tongue over Shy's bronze skin, darkened with blood. The now familiar taste of iron and salt, tinged with treacle-like sweetness, sent a shiver of alertness through his body. He tore himself away before he could overstay his welcome, and Shy casually wrapped her hand around the wound.

He met her eyes. A bright ring of red had blossomed around her slit pupils, terribly reminiscent of the Dark Lord.

"Focus on me," Shy said, her voice suddenly crisper. "We'll play a game. What number am I thinking of?"

Harry furrowed his brow, staring at her. Like he was trying to look through her, she had said. A number? A number instantly flashed into his mind, and he dutifully repeated it, though he was doubtful. "Seven hundred forty-eight?"

"Nice one," she said, to his surprise. "Your turn."

"I just think of a number?" he asked. She nodded. Harry finally settled on the number two. Then, feeling a little mischievous, tried his best to occlude.

Shy's eyes burned a brighter red. "What gives? Are you even thinking of anything?"

"Sorry," Harry said a little guiltily. "I wanted to see if I could keep you out."

"Well, I suppose I could use a challenge," she said, grinning viciously. Harry felt suddenly lightheaded. "Two!" Shy declared.

"That's right," Harry said, shaking his head to clear out the feeling of cobwebs in his head.

They played a few rounds more, until Harry found he couldn't get anything.

"Are you occluding now?" he asked.

Shy blinked. "Am I what?"

"Trying to stop me?" Harry clarified. Shy shook her head.

"I reckon my blood's worn off," she said. "You didn't take much, and it costs blood to use our powers. Other people's blood, I mean. Obviously you've got your own but I don't think you can use it like that."

"Oh," Harry said, a little disappointed that this wasn't quite the shortcut to learning legilimency that he had hoped for. "Thanks for showing me."

"Sure. It was fun. Want to help me with this tentacula?" Shy asked, turning back to her forgotten gardening. Harry eyed the flailing tentacle, which was already equipped with a pair of inch-long fangs.

"I'm really not that great at herbology," he said quickly. "And I better go back inside. Homework."

Shy laughed, but did not try to keep him as he retreated into the coffin house.

Petri was busy chiselling wood in the back of the room seated on a high stool. He glanced up as Harry entered and threw a wand at him, which Harry caught reflexively before it could stab him in the neck.

"Try casting the levitation charm with that," Petri said.

Harry pointed the experimental wand a piece of parchment on the table. " _Wingardium leviosa_." Swish and flick. The paper flew into the air, as if blown by a strong breeze, and flopped over, drifting to the ground.

"So it's the same for you. It isn't holding onto the right shape," Petri muttered. He held out his hand, and Harry walked over to return the wand. Petri took it, setting it aside and trading it for his actual wand. He checked the time, wiping his eyes with the edge of his sleeve. "Did you enjoy your walk? You were out for quite some time."

"I was talking to one of our neighbours," Harry said. "I've been wondering—why are vampires' eyes red? And the Dark Lord's eyes too?"

Petri pointed his wand off to the side and narrowed his eyes. The tip glowed red. "Magic in small amounts is invisible to us. Concentrate more magic in a small area, and it will begin to glow red. Yet more, and it brightens to white."

The light at the tip of Petri's wand bled into sunny yellow, before paling to a fluorescent white. As he held it for even longer, the light began to turn distinctly blue. At this point, he discharged it, the bright beam of the Enemy's Curse flashing across the room and dissipating against the wall to no effect.

"The red eye effect is a result of relatively powerful magic being cast from the eyes. For vampires, it is an expression of the vampire's curse. As for the Dark Lord, he must constantly be maintaining some sort of ocular spell. Perhaps it is simply to enhance his vision, or perhaps there is some more sinister purpose," Petri said.

"There are spells to make you see better, then?" Harry asked. Petri glanced at him critically.

"There are all manner of charms to help one see the unseen. If you are interested in ordinary vision correction, I believe there is a way to transfigure your eyes into a more ideal shape. Of course, as with all human transfiguration, there is a risk of it going very wrong, which would probably render you blind. Are my spectacular spectacles not to your satisfaction?" he asked.

"No—I mean, yes, they're really great," Harry said hastily, grasping the frames of his glasses with both hands, as if Petri might snatch them off his face. "They've helped me out a lot. I was just wondering, that's all."

Petri grunted. "Have you been spying on people with them, then?"

"No!" Harry denied. "Well, not without good cause. You heard about a Hogwarts student committing suicide, right?"

"It was in the paper, yes," Petri said, tilting his head in curiosity.

Harry quickly told him about the cursed book they had uncovered, and how it had been influencing Penelope.

Petri had worn a light frown all through the story. "I've never heard about a curse that can cause depression," he said. "Genuine emotions are notoriously difficult to create with magic. Was it perhaps something like a dementor's aura?"

Harry shook his head. "It seemed like a totally ordinary book to me. I think you must have had to write in it for it to curse you."

"What was the title of the book? Do you know?" Petri asked.

Harry frowned, trying to recall it. To his surprise, the image of the title page jumped suddenly into his head with crystal clarity. "It was called _Bridging the Veil._ "

Petri nearly pitched off his stool. " _Bridging the Veil_?"

"You've heard of it?" Harry asked, blinking in surprise.

"It's a necromancer's artefact. Supposedly it can reliably induce prophetic trances," Petri explained, sounding bewildered. "I don't see how it could induce depression."

"Perhaps it's a different book with the same name?" Harry speculated, equally confused.

"Perhaps," Petri muttered, clearly unconvinced. "You said that Dumbledore confiscated the book? I'll ask him if I can take a look at it."

Harry shrugged, thinking it unlikely that Dumbledore would be daft enough to just let Petri borrow a dark artefact. He pulled up a chair at the table and sat down, bringing both his hands up to cover a yawn.

Seeing this, Petri said, "You may consider going to bed."

"I'm trying to go nocturnal again," Harry protested, swallowing another yawn.

"Perhaps that isn't such a good idea. You'll be returning to school in a matter of weeks," Petri pointed out.

"But if I sleep at night, what would I do all day?" Harry asked.

"Practise conjuration. Read. Write the homework that I'm sure you have been assigned," Petri suggested. Harry wrinkled his nose.

"I don't want to stay inside the whole time. I need to do some Christmas shopping still," he said, pasting a hopeful look on his face. "Can I go to Carkitt tomorrow?"

"Dumbledore's pet werewolf can take you," Petri said, to Harry's surprise, as he had expected to be shot down. "He has been tasked with your protection." A disdainful eye-roll told Harry what Petri thought of that.

"Protection against the Dark Lord?" Harry asked, just to be sure.

"Against his followers," Petri corrected. "Dumbledore has informed me that the Dark Lord does not appear to be personally targeting you. Based on this information and what we know of your fate, I think it is unlikely that you will be at risk of death, but that does not mean that you cannot be maimed."

Harry grimaced at this unwelcome but valid point. He had been so focused on the possibility of dying that other, perhaps worse scenarios had not even occurred to him.

"Be wary of the werewolf as well," Petri added. "He does seem uncommonly tame, but remember that under the civilised facade is a beast with a predilection for human flesh."

"But he's supposed to be my protection?" Harry asked. "Seems a little like a double-edged sword."

"I am told he was friends with your parents," Petri said.

Harry perked up at this. He still knew precious little about his parents, something which most certainly needed to change if he was to have any hope of bringing them back. His earlier attempts with Ulrich had shown him that a mere passing familiarity would likely be insufficient.

"And he'll be awake during the day?" Harry asked. Petri nodded, writing down an address for him. It was for a flat in one of the neighbouring alleys that turned off from Knockturn. "This isn't another _fidelius_ charm, is it?" Harry muttered suspiciously.

"No, no _fidelius_ ," Petri said, eyes crinkling in amusement. "But I recommend you call him by floo so that he can come to retrieve you. Dumbledore does not want you to leave the graveyard unaccompanied."

"How do I call instead of just going through?" Harry asked.

Petri looked a little surprised at this question, but answered anyway: "What you need to do is use half the regular amount of floo powder. When the fire turns green, say the address and put only your head in the fire."

"Right, okay," Harry said, blinking.

"I'll write it down," Petri said, scribbling an addendum on the parchment. He made a shooing motion with his other hand. "Go to bed. You look like you can hardly sit up straight."

Petri was right. Harry swayed slightly as he got to his feet, blinking with aching eyes. For a moment, he stared into the corner of the room where his bed used to be in blank incomprehension. It had been a long day. Recalling the new layout, he dragged himself into the next room.


	52. Vanquisher

Harry's eyes snapped open. They stung with the raw prickle of interrupted sleep, but he was wide awake now and could not imagine closing them again. He sat up in the darkness and rolled out of bed, careful not to make a sound as he replaced the covers over the warm spot he had vacated. Lowering himself, he reached underneath the bedframe until his fingers struck something solid. He felt along the metal ridges until he secured his grasp around the handle of his trunk and tugged ever-so-softly.

For a moment, he paused, struck by the ridiculousness of what he was doing. What _was_ he doing?

The moment passed, the fog of sleep returning with a sudden vengeance and washing away all doubts. He must be dreaming.

The clasps clicked unavoidably, deafening in the silence and secrecy. Harry tensed. He lifted the lid of his trunk slowly, very slowly, slipping his other hand inside. Instantly he felt the slippery material of his invisibility cloak, which he had shoved on top of all his other things. He drew it out with a soft swish and let the lid fall gently. Standing up, wary of the creaking of his knees, he toed the trunk back under the bed and draped the cloak over his body. Then he waited.

All was quiet but for the very faint susurration of breath from the other side of the room. Petri was still asleep. Letting out a relieved breath, Harry crept through the curtain and across the main room with measured steps. Then he ascended the stairs agonisingly slowly, pushing open the door with the crown of his head.

Blinding sunlight flooded inside. Abandoning his previously languid movement, he shot up out of the house, dropping the casket door and only catching it at the last moment, slipping his fingers out gently. His eyes stung horribly. When he could finally see again, it was only to discover that everything was blurry. He had forgotten his glasses.

This was a very disappointingly logical dream, Harry thought with some disgruntlement, but it was too late to go back now. He trudged across the gravel, wincing as it bit into his bare feet. The grass sprouting wildly over the real graves was cool and slippery, but no less sharp. He did not have to go far, anyway, only into the shade of the yew trees that shielded Knockturn Alley from view. There, he called out softly, "Winky!"

Winky appeared before him with a distinct pop, trembling and wide-eyed as she always was. She reached out. Harry parted the edges of his cloak and took her outstretched hand, and they disappeared.

Terror crashed over him like ice water as the space between space disgorged them on the other side. He was in was Barty's sitting room and this wasn't a dream. Winky had let go and vanished immediately, leaving him alone.

Alone. And he was still invisible. Reigning in his thundering heart and rapid breathing with the full force of his will, he turned full circle on the parquet flooring, glancing every which way, as if the Dark Lord might be hiding behind the banister or under the tea table. As he relinquished his panic, the fog threatened to overwhelm him again, but now that he had recognised it, he could keep it at bay with well-practised indignation.

The imperius curse. How could he be so stupid? He had assumed, just because he had overcome the curse, that the Dark Lord had dispensed with it thereafter. But why should he have? Resisting the imperius curse did not dispel it. In fact, Harry knew that nothing short of the caster's death could end the curse from outside. Once it had been resisted in the first place, once the victim was aware, further resistance wasn't too difficult, but Harry had been so stupid and had let down his guard.

Dumbledore had been absolutely right to suspect it. Harry had dismissed the thought at the time—of course he had. That was how the imperius curse worked. He knew that. Shame and fury crawled down his back in the form of cold sweat.

He stepped cautiously over to the floo, nerves heightening irrationally at the slight thump, thump of his bare footfalls on the waxed wood. Nobody appeared to stop him, and he relaxed minutely as he reached the fireplace. If Voldemort was relying on the imperius curse, perhaps it would not be too difficult to escape after all.

He glanced up to the mantelpiece. His heart sank. The floo powder jug was missing. Just in case, he searched all around for a few minutes, clinging to the foolish hope that Barty had just redecorated since summer, or that his myopia had blurred out something obvious, but no, there were no containers of any kind near the hearth.

His fingers twitched. He didn't have his wand. Even if he had it, he wasn't sure it would have done him much good, but without it he felt naked. He was also in his nightgown and barefoot, so that feeling wasn't too off the mark. Giving up the fireplace, he moved for the physical exit instead, daring to walk more quickly now. His hand hovered mistrustfully over the door handle. It wouldn't be cursed, would it?

Since when was he that circumspect? Harry grit his teeth as he realised what was going on. The Dark Lord had told him once himself. Provide a reason for action, and the victim of the curse would do the rest. There, softly, in the back of his mind, a gentle voice whispered for him to stay in the room. He had no chance of getting out. He didn't want to displease the Dark Lord.

Harry forced his hand to close around the handle, despite every warning bell going off in his head. They were all false, manufactured to cow him into submission. He tugged the door open and promptly screamed.

A middle-aged man stood on the other side, mouth open in shock underneath a well-manicured handlebar moustache. His wand had sprung into his hand, and he was glancing warily about the seemingly empty room.

"Harry?" he called out.

Harry stiffened, wondering how the man knew who he was. Was this a Death Eater he had not yet met? He tried to sidle out of the way, but this plan was foiled when the man promptly cast a human-revealing charm and then nailed him with the Full Body-Bind curse. Harry toppled over and his cloak fell away. His heart galloped in his chest.

"Oh. Sorry. Why were you hiding?" asked the man, an almost sheepish expression crossing his face. "I thought maybe it wasn't you. _Finite_."

Surprised to find himself free to move, Harry jumped cautiously to his feet. "Who are you?" he asked.

"Oh!" said the man, eyes widening in an expressive way that did not suit the severe cast of his face. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a flask, which he quickly unscrewed and took a swig from. It was like somebody had run a flat iron over his face—all the lines straightened out, and the grey bled from his hair until it shone like burnished gold.

"Barty?" Harry said, stunned at the transformation. He squinted, doubting his vision, but it was undeniable. A now-familiar set of features grinned back at him. Barty was running the tip of his wand over his upper lip, erasing the rather uncharacteristic moustache.

"Sorry about the face. I wasn't expecting you in the middle of the day. Had to run back from work. Been impersonating my old man so nobody knows he's kicked the bucket," Barty said, grimacing. "Conveniently, we look alike."

Harry blinked, his heart still threatening to burst out of his chest. Barty didn't sound like he was about to deliver him to his death, but appearances could be deceiving.

"Sorry," Harry finally said. "I'm not—I'm not really sure why I'm here. I thought…"

He decided it would be better for him not to go into too much detail about what he had thought, and was still thinking.

Barty waved a hand. "Don't worry. I've been expecting you. Master told me you'd be here some time this week, said he'd instructed you to sneak out when you wouldn't be missed." He checked his pocket watch. "Are you sure this is a good time? Your guardians out or something?"

"Asleep," Harry said, supposing that 'instructed' was one way of putting it. "We're usually nocturnal."

"Ah, that's right. I forgot you associate with vampires," Barty said, shaking his head. "Do you want to sit down?"

Harry glanced down to where he had been twisting his invisibility cloak into a tight knot and forced himself to relax, trying to bring his meagre occlumency to bear. He gathered up the fabric into a loose pile and took a seat at the edge of a chaise longue. Barty flopped down on the couch across from him.

"I'll summon him now, but I don't know how long it'll take him to respond. Make yourself comfortable. Would you like some tea?"

Harry blinked. "That would be nice. Thanks."

Barty snapped his fingers, and a moment later Winky was scurrying into the room with a tea set balanced above her head. She must have been skulking about the whole time, listening in. Harry hid a grimace. The way elves could fade into the background like that was incredibly inconvenient.

Paying her no mind, Barty pulled up his sleeve, taking a moment to admire the Dark Mark reverently, before pressing a deliberate fingertip into the scar. It flared black, and he inhaled sharply in pain, though by the ecstatic smile on his face one might have assumed it was pleasure.

Harry closed his eyes, focusing inwardly in case he might get a vision from the Dark Lord, but nothing happened after a few moments. He wondered for the first time if his occlumency was perhaps blocking their strange connection, and if that was not one of the reasons why Voldemort had been so adamant to have him learn it in the first place. When he opened his eyes, Barty was still staring into space, grinning. Harry's gaze flickered to the Dark Mark. He touched his own left arm, remembering what Lord Voldemort had done with it that day in the forest, with the dementors, and how it had hurt for weeks afterwards.

"Barty, can I ask you a sort of personal question?" Harry murmured, sipping at his tea and shivering as it warmed him up from the inside.

"Go ahead," said Barty, turning his head languidly.

"Does it ever hurt when you do magic?"

The smile slid from Barty's face in an instant. "Have you been experiencing pain?"

Harry shook his head hastily. "No, it's not that. I just read about magical sensitivity in a book. It said that people who do dark magic can get it…"

Barty relaxed. "Yes, that's right. To answer your question, it only hurts when I cast the cruciatus curse. But that's fair, don't you think? That way, my victim and I, we're connected in a special way." He clenched and unclenched his fist, a lazy grin spreading across his face.

"Right," Harry mumbled, blinking. "Why only with the cruciatus? Do you know?"

"Simple enough. It's hard to cast the cruciatus curse calmly. I'd even say it was impossible, if I hadn't seen Master do it time and again. Emotion affects magic, you see—anger and excitement are especially powerful conductors. But the cruciatus is already one of the most intensive curses around, so amplifying it with emotion takes quite the toll on the body," Barty explained.

Dumbledore had said something like that once, Harry remembered suddenly. Emotion leaves traces. He had also said that Hogwarts didn't teach those sorts of things.

"Where did you learn about all that?" Harry asked. "Are there books about how magic works?"

"There are books, but every author has his own theory," Barty said. "Nobody really knows for certain, you see, because nobody has ever figured out how to measure magic. Of course, I think Master's theory is right, or he never would have got as far as he has. He's immortal, you know?"

"Yeah," Harry said. He rather thought that he knew first hand how immortal Voldemort was, having been the one to put it to the test. "What do you mean by 'measuring' magic? As in how much of it there is?"

"How much there is, whether it's even there at all, anything! We can detect magic once it's in use, but what is it like before we cast a spell, when nobody's trying to use it? Does it really even exist in that state? We can't even answer that basic question," Barty said, slamming his palm down on the arm of the couch with sudden vehemence.

"How could it not exist?" Harry demanded, mystified. "There are things that affect magic in the air, aren't there? Dementors. Nullifiers." He bit his lip.

"Passive magic is still magic that we're using," Barty said. "We can influence it long before it enters our bodies. Some people even think magic actually comes from wizards, that we create it. That's codswallop of course—there are magical plants that grow in isolated places, for Merlin's sake. But who knows? Maybe those plants create magic too."

"Does it matter which it is?" Harry asked.

Barty shrugged. "I suppose in most ordinary contexts it doesn't matter. But we might be interested in theoretical questions like whether it's possible to run out of magic."

Having felt before what it was like to run out of magic, Harry was sceptical. "So you're saying that we don't know if dementors really suck all the magic out of the air?"

"I'm saying that we know that they don't. It's a purely psychological effect. You can prove that with occlumency," Barty said. "A skilled occlumens can block out a dementor's aura completely, and their magic won't be affected."

"Oh," Harry said. He resolved to practise harder at occlumency. It seemed to be such a vital skill. "Why don't they teach everybody occlumency? I mean, do they? Later on at school?"

"No, at least, not in my day. I learned everything I know from my master. It requires a lot of one-on-one instruction and trust to teach occlumency, and most people never need it. Legilimens and dementors aren't exactly common," Barty said.

At that moment, three heavy knocks resounded through the house, and Winky popped into view by the table.

"Master's master is being at the door," she announced.

"Already? Quickly, invite him in, Winky," Barty said, jumping to his feet. Harry scrambled to follow, feeling foolish and underdressed in only his nightclothes. This low-level embarrassment somehow managed to override the dread of his imminent doom, leaving him flustered rather than trembling.

The Dark Lord swept into the sitting room like a tall black spectre. Barty, predictably, threw himself onto the floor, while Harry bowed awkwardly from behind him. Lord Voldemort's utterly blank face suggested distraction, or perhaps even urgency. He nodded to Barty and then moved straight to the point.

"Harry, are you prepared to learn your fate?"

Harry froze, wondering if he was about to die, but the Dark Lord only held out a pale hand. Hesitantly, Harry reached out, and the Dark Lord's fingers closed around his securely. There was no pain in his scar, just a faint squeeze on his body. The world shifted around them, more smoothly than any apparition Harry had ever undergone. A musty scent rushed into Harry's nostrils, and he blinked against the dappled light shining through a network of needled boughs. They had appeared in a coniferous forest. A frigid wind bit at Harry's exposed neck and ankles, seeping through the thin material of his nightgown.

Lord Voldemort, still holding his hand tightly, turned to the trunk of a tree taller than any Harry had ever seen. The Dark Lord placed his palm against its rough bark, pressing against it with a look of intense concentration.

A moment later they were inside the tree—or so Harry's dumbfounded mind immediately supposed. They had appeared in a cramped circular chamber, perhaps five metres across and barely tall enough to accommodate the Dark Lord's considerable height. The wooden floor was marked with concentric rings, and the walls were rough and gnarled, almost veiny. Incongruously, the space was furnished with an ordinary desk and a chair, as well what appeared to be a handheld gas lamp, which glimmered with soft orange light.

Lord Voldemort had let go of him and taken a step back. In the dim illumination, Harry could make out no more than an indistinct form silhouetted by lamplight. The room was suffocatingly silent, and he could hear his own heartbeat thudding inside his chest.

Finally, Lord Voldemort spoke. "Pay close attention," he said, reaching into his pocket. He produced a familiar white orb. Harry's breath caught. The prophecy.

With a violent jerk of his hand, the Dark Lord dashed the orb to the ground. Harry yelped and recoiled as it shattered into a cloud of brilliant dust at his feet. At once, a smoky figure began to coalesce from the remains. His jaw dropped as he recognised Professor Trelawney.

" _The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches… born to those who thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies…_ "

The Dark Lord leaned forward, his eyes literally glowing red in the gloom.

"… _and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not… and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives…_ "

Harry's heart sunk to the bottom of his stomach like a stone.

"… _the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord will be born as the seventh month dies…_ "

What power? Harry felt on the verge of terrified laughter. In this moment, alone with the Dark Lord, he was more powerless than ever.

The Dark Lord was still staring contemplatively as the apparition faded away into formless smoke, which drifted hazily to the ground. His wand had appeared back in his hand, where he twirled it absently.

"I see," he said at length, turning his bright eyes on Harry. "Neither can live while the other survives. What do you make of that, Harry?"

This question startled Harry out of his deepening panic—he had almost missed that line, given the other, much more worrying contents. He took a moment to think, but could come up with nothing better than, "It can't be literally true. We're both alive right now. My lord."

Lord Voldemort looked a little amused, but he nodded. "To live may also mean to tolerate, as in to live with something. However, I believe that I can live very well with your survival."

He closed the distance between them at lightning speed and poked Harry in the forehead. There was no pain besides the blunt impact of the bony finger against his temple. The hand trailed down to close over his shoulder. Harry could see now that the Dark Lord was smiling, as if he had just shared an especially witty joke. This good humour was bewildering after what they had just heard, but Harry was reluctant to question it. Instead, he was busy with the unsettling thought that of course, things would be so much better if there were no Dark Lord. Petri would still be the worst person in his life, and he could live in ignorance of his fate.

His gaze flickered to the shards of glass that lay strewn over the wooden floor. No. The Dark Lord might have been the one to kill his parents, possess him, and threaten his continued existence, but all of that had been directly _caused_ by the prophecy, not only presaged. At least, until now, Harry had assumed this to be the case. But how was that possible?

"My lord," he said, wetting his lips, which were painfully cracked, "If you didn't know the prophecy until now, why did you come after me as a baby?"

Lord Voldemort's eyes shuttered, and Harry tensed, but he answered without incident: "I did not know the entirety of the prophecy, but I had heard the first part of it and thought to nip the problem in the bud. I admit that it never once occurred to me that I would be at risk. After all, the words given to me never said that I would be vanquished, only that somebody would be born with the power to do so."

Harry tried not to frown, because frankly he did not see what had changed. Why was the Dark Lord now willing to let him, the same person, live, when before he had been happy to kill a baby in order to prevent any possibility of somebody becoming stronger than him? Though he itched to know, Harry wasn't suicidal enough to pose this question.

The Dark Lord answered it anyway. "Now, in hindsight, I understand that you were not born with any special power at all. I have caused this power in you, the power to vanquish me, through my own folly. Now we have heard the entire prophecy. No matter how we strive to avoid the outcome, it will come to pass. So, we must leave open a possible future that both fulfils the prophecy and is amenable to us both. Tell me, Harry—how long would you like to live?"

Harry's heart jumped back into his throat at this terrible question. The Dark Lord was hardly a foot away from him, inside a doorless, windowless room. There was nowhere to even attempt an escape. "I—a long time, please."

"A hundred years? A thousand? Forever?" the Dark Lord suggested. These timescales quelled Harry's panic somewhat.

"Not forever," Harry said honestly. A strange gleam came into the Dark Lord's eye. "But a hundred sounds pretty good—how long do people normally live?"

"An ordinary wizard lives about a century, though he can make it to two or even three hundred if he is lucky. I plan to live until the end of time, and you will not stop me. When the time comes that you tire of this life," the Dark Lord paused here, eyes narrowing, "then you will seek me out, and I shall kill you."

Harry thought furiously about this proposal. It seemed to fit into the wording of the prophecy, but for one thing, the very line that the Dark Lord had first drawn his attention to. "My lord, what about that line, that neither can live while the other survives? It might not be true now, but…" Harry swallowed, but he felt it had to be said, "it has to come true in the future, right? Doesn't that mean that any agreement we come to now will eventually fall apart?"

Lord Voldemort peered at him shrewdly, finally releasing his shoulder. "The prophecy is a description of the future, until one day it becomes a description of the past. But the future is always ahead of us. As long as we are alive, we remain firmly in the present, which is a product of our choices and nothing else. I do not intend to promise what I cannot deliver. And you, Harry? Are you suggesting that you would break your word to me?"

"No, of course not," Harry said, a knot of trepidation still churning in his chest. How could he articulate his worry without accusing the Dark Lord of dishonesty? He was reminded inexorably of the future he had seen, the smoky flashes of spellfire in the fumes of Aleksandra's skull and the solid column of light in the crystal.

Slowly, but no less threateningly for it, the Dark Lord moved his wand until it rested lightly under Harry's chin. Harry stood stock still, hardly daring to breathe.

"Do you believe that I could not kill you this instant if I so desired?" the Dark Lord asked conversationally.

Ever so slightly, Harry shook his head, entirely cognisant of the smooth wood ghosting over his throat. "I'm sure you could, my lord."

The wand disappeared into the Dark Lord's sleeve, and Harry let out a shaky breath, his whole body trembling. He felt numb.

"In that case, you must trust that I do not wish for your death. Indeed, I desire the very opposite for you—a long life, safe from harm," said the Dark Lord.

This was too much for Harry. "You ordered my death," he blurted. "I almost died at school."

"And yet, here you are, alive and well," Lord Voldemort said coolly. He slipped into the smooth, whispery tones of Parseltongue. "Trust me, Harry. You have more to offer me than you know. You have and will continue to help me, and Lord Voldemort rewards his helpers."

Some reward, Harry couldn't help thinking, but aloud he said simply, "But why? Why… pretend to want me dead?"

"Dumbledore," Lord Voldemort hissed, the blocky syllables of the name falling from his lipless mouth like stones. "Dumbledore must never suspect that I hold anything but ill will towards you. Did you never wonder why the prophecy, a prophecy about _me_ , was told to Albus Dumbledore?"

"Because he's your enemy, my lord?" Harry suggested.

"And for all that he is my enemy, the prophecy does not foretell his victory. He does not even feature in my fate. This is proof that he is nothing more than an old coward, unable to face me head on. All he can do is orchestrate circumstances from the sidelines, sharpen others into tools to fight his battles for him." The Dark Lord betrayed more passion in these words than Harry had ever seen him express. His scar throbbed with each declaration, though not entirely unpleasantly, like a lingering burn rather than the usual knife's edge.

"My lord, Dumbledore told me that he couldn't ever kill someone. But he refused to say why," Harry said. He felt a twinge of uncertainty at revealing this information, but remembered then that Dumbledore had given him leave to tell the Dark Lord everything.

The Dark Lord scoffed. "Doubtless he does not wish to sully his soul. He must believe himself still innocent."

In a moment of clarity, Harry realised that he was standing in front of what might be the world's foremost expert on tampering with souls. His mouth went dry. How to ask what he wished to know?

"How can a soul be sullied? I thought—my master, he told me that souls are the same as forms. How can that be good or bad?" Harry said. He flushed as the words left his mouth, wondering if asking the Dark Lord to humour him here was too much.

But the Dark Lord's eyes glinted with interest rather than derision. "Like any value judgement, this one refers to some arbitrary standard. Dumbledore believes that continuity is the highest virtue. A whole soul, from birth to death—he believes that such a soul will guarantee the most coherent afterlife, and that any break in continuity will deny him that privilege. He is not wrong about the bare facts," he said, to Harry's surprise. The Dark Lord smiled grimly, "but he has missed the point entirely. To sacrifice the life one already has for a pipe dream of the next is the height of foolishness. Do you not agree, Harry?"

When it was put that way, the Dark Lord's position was difficult to argue against. "I suppose so, my lord. But there really is an afterlife? It's not just superstition?"

Lord Voldemort tilted his head to the side. "The answer depends on how you define afterlife. After a wizard dies, he does indeed continue to exist in some form or another. But there is no life as we know it after death. If there were, we would no longer call it death, but some other name. You are, of course, wondering what the afterlife is like. I cannot offer you an answer, for I have never died. My personal suspicion is that it is not like anything from the inside, because it is devoid of will, the very basis of conscious experience."

That was right. Will was something unique to the living, and magic could not create will. And things without physical bodies, according to Dumbledore, also had no will. But then… Harry swallowed and decided to take the plunge. "How did you live without a body?"

Lord Voldemort leaned forward, and Harry's scar twinged. "You are a very curious boy, are you not?" he whispered into Harry's ear. "Curiosity is not a sin, but you would do well to temper it with due caution. The price for some secrets may be higher than you can afford."

"Yes, my lord," Harry said, averting his gaze. He felt a terrible prickling at the back of his neck as he took his eyes off the Dark Lord, but better that than risk challenging him any further.

The Dark Lord put a bony hand on Harry's head, brushing the fringe from his scar with a sweep of his thumb. "Dumbledore must be desperately trying to find a way to end me," he mused.

Harry could not help going rigid. Hastily, he said, "Yes, my lord, he is."

The Dark Lord laughed softly in the back of his throat. "Show me." He pushed Harry's head back. Though he was smiling, his eyes were cold, two ruby pinpricks that bored into Harry's mind like needles.

Harry thought of Dumbledore, of a forest in Albania and teachers in China. A forest in Albania. They were inside a tree right now, in a forest. Could it be?

"We are, indeed, currently in Albania," Lord Voldemort informed him. He did not seem particularly concerned about what he had found in Harry's memories. "As usual, Dumbledore knows more than he should but not enough to change anything. He has no idea how precarious his position really is."

Harry had no idea, either, of what the Dark Lord was talking about. Lord Voldemort chuckled softly to himself, releasing his grip on Harry's hair. "You will understand soon enough."

With that, the Dark Lord extracted them from the tree and returned Harry to Barty's house, where the floo powder jug had mysteriously reappeared. Even ameliorated by magic, the fire felt uncomfortably hot against his frozen extremities, and he almost landed on his face in the dirt as he stumbled out into the owl shed at Sixty-Six Knockturn. Each step felt like walking on needles, and he was half convinced several times that he had stepped on a sharp twig and torn up his foot, but he managed to get back home unbloodied.

He wanted nothing more than to collapse into bed and never get up again, but he remembered that he had Christmas shopping to do. If he laid down, he had the strong suspicion that he would be unable to work up the willpower to exit the covers for the rest of the day, so he forced himself to stay clear of the alluring mattress and instead only ducked into the curtained room to finally get his wand, change into his robes, and put on some shoes, tiptoeing past a slumbering Petri. On the way out, he grabbed his winter cloak and picked up the note with his werewolf protector's address:

_Remus Lupin, 343C Purefair Alley. To floo call: half measure floo powder, head only._

Slipping it into his pocket, he took the stairs two at a time to try to inject some pep into his sluggish body. It didn't work; his head pounded with ever greater intensity in the crisp winter air and his leg promptly cramped.

Back at the public floo, he slipped a knut into the powder dispenser, cranking the dial on its side to the line marked '1/2', whose purpose had finally become clear to him. A puff of glittering powder caused the flames to whoosh into a familiar green, but Harry was still nervous about sticking his head in there. What if it tried to pull him through anyway? Gruesome images of his head twisting off his neck, hurtling its bloody way down the green corridor before flopping out of some unfortunate's fireplace, flickered in his mind's eye.

He shook his head at his own ridiculousness. People must do this all the time.

"Three Forty-Three C Purefair Alley," he enunciated. The fire flickered with what he hoped was acknowledgement. Taking a deep breath, Harry knelt down and stuck his head into the flames.

It felt a little like putting his face in a basin of water, only he could still breathe and see on the other side. What he saw was a sparsely furnished sitting room with rough wooden flooring and a threadbare couch that was missing a seat cushion. There was nobody in sight.

"Hello?" Harry called out. It would be just his luck if nobody was home, or he had called the wrong address.

But a moment later, a door at the flickering edge of his vision thumped open and Lupin rushed into view, clad in muggle trousers and a white cotton shirt.

"Hello, can I help you?" the man asked, kneeling down in front of the fire. The vantage point was strange—Harry still had to look up to see his face, even though it was barely a foot off the ground.

"My uncle said that you could take me to Diagon Alley," Harry said after a beat. When Lupin looked confused, he amended, "He said you could take Harry Potter to Diagon Alley."

"Oh, yes, that's right," said Lupin with a distracted smile. Harry noted that his teeth looked perfectly human. Was he really a werewolf?

"Sorry if it's sudden, but are you free right now?" Harry asked.

Lupin nodded. "Give me a moment to get ready and I'll come through the floo."

Harry pulled his head back with a sudden feeling of vertigo. He backed up, peering into the orange flames expectantly. About a minute later they flared green and Lupin came sliding out, twisting to his feet in a practised motion.

He had put on a lumpy grey coat over a set of brown robes which fluttered about his ankles, not quite covering the hems of his trousers. Harry supposed he looked shabby enough to be a denizen of Knockturn, but his gentle, clean-shaven face ruined the effect.

"All right. Where to first?" Lupin asked, making for the door. The suddenly disgruntled owls in the shed rustled their feathers and clicked their beaks as he passed by.

Harry already had Neville's present from Petri's stock—a remembrall colour tuner, so that left sweets for the rest of his friends, except Hermione, who had something against sugar. He'd get her a book of some kind.

"Sugarplum's, I suppose," Harry said, wincing internally at the future state of his gold bag. Their handmade, bespelled confectionery was truly extravagant in every sense of the word.

Lupin raised an eyebrow. "Sweets before dinner?"

"It's not for me," Harry felt it necessary to say. "Christmas presents."

"Why not Honeydukes?" Lupin asked.

"I forgot to put in an owl order," Harry said, sighing.

"No matter, we can simply go to Honeydukes now, if you want," Lupin offered.

"In Hogsmeade?" Harry asked, eliciting a short laugh.

Lupin reached out and ruffled his hair. Harry stiffened for a moment, but it was a much warmer gesture than anything Lord Voldemort had ever managed, so he relaxed. "No, there's a Honeydukes on Latter Alley."

Harry blinked. "Where? I've only been to Diagon and Horizont."

"It's on the other end of Horizont, past Corkscrew Avenue," Lupin explained, whereupon Harry discovered that he had been pronouncing 'Horizont' incorrectly this whole time, and that the 't' was silent.

Harry did not like the sound of Corkscrew Avenue. Wizards, he had noticed, named things extremely literally, possibly due to some grammatological principle he had yet to learn. Knockturn, for example, lived up to its name by being active at night, dingy during the day, and full of twists and turns, while Horizont ran straight from east to west except where it had to wrap all the way around Carkitt Market. Incidentally, Carkitt Market had a very worrying name too, but Harry had already been there several times and was still alive. Perhaps the idea was that anybody who shopped there would want to die after realising how much money they'd inadvertently spent.

Instead of going up Knockturn towards Diagon Alley, they went the other way, past Annette's house, which was as far as Harry had ever gone in this direction. The houses here seemed even shabbier than in the upper part of Knockturn, if that was possible. Everywhere he looked he found peeling paint, cracked facades, and sloping roofs with missing shingles. Soon enough, Knockturn Alley ended entirely and they turned onto a different street whose cobblestones were overgrown with yellowing knotweed and foxtails. A chipped sign hanging from a lamppost with no lamp read, 'Purefair Alley.'

"You live here?" Harry asked, trying not to frown.

"Just around the corner," Lupin confirmed, pointing out a grim block of flats peeking over the rooftops of some dilapidated townhouses. Harry couldn't keep his face from twisting.

"Don't mending charms work on houses?" he asked.

Lupin's lip quirked up ruefully. "Not everybody has the privilege of carrying a wand."

Uncertain how to ask politely, Harry figured he would just ask impolitely. "Are werewolves not allowed to have wands, then?" If Lupin was supposed to be protecting him, he thought it would be a relevant detail.

Lupin stiffened noticeably, missing a step. He looked askance at Harry, though he didn't seem offended. "I suppose Peters told you about my condition? Werewolves are considered to be wizards, thankfully, so there is no wand ban for us. However, most werewolves these days were infected as children, and so didn't get the opportunity to attend Hogwarts. I was lucky. When I was about school age, Dumbledore had just become headmaster. He knew about my condition, but was willing to make accommodations."

"That was kind of him," Harry said. "Does that mean there are werewolves at Hogwarts now too?"

"I should hope not," Lupin said with a nervous laugh. "It's is a rare affliction. Most of us try our best never to infect anybody else. Theoretically, if we all did our part, the curse could be eradicated in a generation."

"How does it spread?" Harry asked, screwing up his face in thought. "In my textbook I think it said humans turn into werewolves when bitten. Does that mean any bite, or does it have to be the full moon?"

"It's a bite while transformed, of course. We're perfectly human the rest of the month, and as likely as you are to bite someone," Lupin said, pressing his lips together.

"Right. I didn't mean anything by it. I just don't know much about werewolves," Harry said quickly. Lupin had sped up somewhat, and Harry found himself jogging to keep up. He wasn't sure if the werewolf was being completely forthright—he had clear incentive to appear to Harry in a favourable light, but at the same time, the things Petri had told him might well have been exaggerated. Merlin knew the man had little regard for half-breeds.

"I suppose you wouldn't," Lupin allowed, his face softening somewhat. He slowed down again, which was fortunate, as the cobblestones had dwindled to uneven gravel and they were knee deep in dry, prickly grass. "You're in your second year at Hogwarts?"

Harry nodded. "Yeah."

"What creatures have you covered in Defence so far?" Lupin asked.

Harry had to take a moment to think about this question. Professor Quirrell had largely covered the basic theory of defensive magic, focusing on how to call for help in case of an attack and all-purpose spells to impede threats. Lockhart, well… there had been the pixies.

"Nothing, really," Harry said. "Just some household pests."

Lupin made a surprised noise in the back of his throat. "Really? What about red caps or hinkypunks?"

"I don't think so," Harry admitted, flushing a little. He supposed they sounded familiar enough to have been in his creatures textbook, but they certainly weren't one of the ones whose blood was useful for any special enchantment, or he was sure he would have remembered them.

"Red caps you ought to learn how to deal with, at least," Lupin said. "I remember there were some living in the Forbidden Forest when I was a student. Mostly just a nuisance, but nasty if they get the drop on you. They're elves who've fixated on blood, and they'll try to bash your head open to dye their clothes red. The name red cap comes from their cap, obviously, but pretty much everything else about them will be crusted with blood too."

He made a face, and Harry mirrored him.

"You said they're elves? Like house elves?" Harry asked, glancing around with some trepidation into their gloomy surroundings, as if expecting a bloodthirsty elf to come sprinting out. They couldn't rightly be said to be walking on a city street anymore. Though lampposts in varying states of disrepair still poked out of the ground at intervals, the buildings had all but disappeared into tangles of brush and untidy rows of gnarled trees.

"Not like house elves," Lupin said, chuckling. "Well, maybe a little like the deranged cousin of a house elf. They're magically very weak, though, so almost any defensive charm or hex will work on them. The important thing is to not let them sneak up on you. Any time there's been significant blood spilled outside, human or animal—it doesn't matter—you should be on the lookout. The good news is that they'll try to kill each other too, so there's not too much danger of them ganging up on you. Still, there was one time that my friends and I were out after curfew—which you shouldn't do, by the way—in fact, you shouldn't do any of the things I'm about to mention—anyway, we were out trying to kidnap a few bowtruckles, and Wormtail, our small and clumsy friend, fell out of the tree and cracked his skull on the ground."

"Wormtail?" Harry repeated, stopping and glancing back.

"Sorry, Peter was his real name. My friends and I all had childish nicknames for each other, naturally, when we were children. We called ourselves the Mauraders," Lupin said, before continuing his story.

Harry stopped paying attention, trying to remember where he had heard that name before. Wormtail. He mouthed it, and the shape of it on his tongue was familiar. His eyes widened.

"Do you still keep in touch? With your school friends?" Harry asked the moment there was a pause. Lupin's face fell, weariness etching premature creases into his brow.

"No. I'm the only one left," he murmured.

"Sorry," Harry said, but he had to know. "But do you mean they're all… dead?"

Lupin's expression darkened even further, though he answered anyway. "Dead or as good as," he said.

Wormtail wasn't dead, or at least, he hadn't been dead a few months ago. Harry was sure it had to be the same person he had seen in his vision, crying and grovelling at Lord Voldemort's feet. What were the odds that two unrelated people would be called Wormtail? Lupin had said it was a nickname for his friend, and Harry was pretty certain it couldn't be somebody's surname. But maybe Lupin didn't know that he was still alive. The Dark Lord, Harry recalled now, had been surprised to see him.

Harry remembered what Petri had said about Lupin knowing his parents.

"Did you know my father—I mean, James Potter? Was he one of you… Marauders?" he asked.

"He was," Lupin said.

Harry bit his lip. "Can you tell me, no, can you tell Harry Potter about his father?"

These words sounded totally ridiculous to his own ears, but they worked. Lupin seemed to warm up considerably when reminded of Harry Potter. Harry trailed behind him a little, hoping that if Lupin couldn't see him, the _fidelius_ charm would not redirect his attention.

"James was… the centre of our group. We were pranksters, the four of us, but really only because James was a prankster. He was the one who came up with most of the good ideas, had the most vision. Peter and I tagged along for the ride. We would be the lookouts or the distractions. I was on library duty most of the time—we must have accidentally studied twice as much magic as we were supposed to, trying to execute all of James's far-fetched plans." Lupin paused and let out a wistful sigh. "James was never one for book learning. He preferred to just 'do it,' as he would say. Had an incredible talent for transfiguration. To this day I probably couldn't replicate some of the things he managed as a teenager. Once, he turned every single fork and spoon in the Great Hall into chopsticks—all by himself, because none of us could manage even one, since they were solid silver."

"Wow," Harry said, trying and failing to estimate how much cutlery that was. It was strange to hear that his father had been a practical joker. The general opinion in Ravenclaw of people like the Weasley twins, who deliberately did annoying things to people, was exactly that they were _annoying_ , but Harry could admit that swapping all the silverware was a little bit funny and mostly harmless.

Lupin had other anecdotes too, one after another, some of them relating to Harry's mother. Apparently she had hated his father for most of their time at Hogwarts. Conversely, his father claimed to have fallen in love with his mother at first sight, and spent the next seven years pursuing her with ever more outlandish displays.

"How did they end up together then?" Harry asked, mystified.

"They got to know each other better in their seventh year, when they were Head Boy and Girl. By then, James had grown up quite a bit. We all had," Lupin said, sobering. "Lord Voldemort's crusade had come right to our doorstep. There was no staying out of it once we left school."

"And the Marauders split up, because they were on different sides?" Harry asked, trying to understand what had happened to Peter and the unnamed fourth Marauder. He felt a cold stab of worry. Would ideology divide him from his friends too some day?

Lupin looked straight at him all of a sudden, as if realising for the first time that he was there.

"How did you—never mind. I must have accidentally mentioned Sirius's name. I was trying not to. You have to understand that even after what he did, I simply cannot bring myself to believe that seven years of friendship were all a lie. Something must have happened towards the end, something big. There was a lot of pressure on everybody at that point. I myself had to rebuff several attempts to recruit me to Lord Voldemort's forces," Lupin said. He seemed far away, and Harry wasn't sure he really believed what he was saying.

"What—what exactly did Sirius do?" Harry asked, knowing full well that Lupin had not named him. Unlike 'Wormtail', 'Sirius' did not ring any bells, which was odd, given that Lupin seemed to expect him to recognise it.

"What didn't he do?" Lupin murmured ruefully. "He betrayed James and Lily's location to Voldemort. They were hiding under a powerful enchantment—pardon me, I forgot you would know about this one already—the _fidelius_ charm. But they put their trust in the wrong person. We all did. And then, as if that wasn't enough, after Lord Voldemort disappeared, he went to finish the job. Hunted Peter down and murdered him in broad daylight."

Harry blinked in astonishment. How was that possible, when Peter wasn't dead?

"This happened a decade ago?" Harry asked, just to make sure he wasn't missing something obvious. Lupin shot him an odd look, but quickly wrenched his gaze away to stare into the distance.

"Yes. Sirius was locked up in Azkaban until the breakout this summer. I assume you've seen him on the wanted posters?" he said.

"Right," Harry mumbled, though it wasn't true, as he hadn't looked too closely at who exactly had escaped from Azkaban—there had been nearly a dozen people.

Lupin sighed. "I'm surprised he hasn't shown himself yet. He was always absolutely single-minded about getting even at all costs, and we all thought he would want revenge for what happened to his master. Lord Voldemort must be using him for something else, but I can't imagine what. Subtlety certainly wasn't one of his strengths."

Harry frowned, resolving to study up on the Azkaban escapees. If the Dark Lord was still set on pretending that he wanted Harry dead, then they would all be a threat to him. He could at least memorise their faces.

"How many followers does Lord Voldemort have?" Harry asked, suddenly worried.

"Nobody knows for certain except Lord Voldemort himself," Lupin said, "but back then he had hundreds at his beck and call, whether they were Death Eaters who had sworn themselves to him, people he'd blackmailed or bewitched, or sympathisers whom he'd made grand promises to. We believe he is actively recruiting, but not back to the level of his old following yet."

"Who are, 'we'?" Harry asked. It was the second time Lupin had referred to some collective.

"Those of us who are working to oppose Lord Voldemort," Lupin said. "Watch out!"

He snatched the back of Harry's cloak just in time to save him from colliding with a broomstick zooming through the next intersection. The rider twisted around and shouted something rude.

"Thanks," Harry said, stumbling back warily, but Lupin continued on, making a tight turn onto a wide, sloped street. There were more broom riders flying up and down the centre, stirring up a chilly wind. Beneath their feet, the path was properly paved again, though the trees had not thinned. Instead, buildings seemed to have sprouted right out of the wood, hanging from a network of boughs like massive rectangular fruits. A large sign affixed to a nearby branch read: 'Vertex Alley – Spyer's Spire Straight Ahead.'

Harry looked straight ahead but didn't see anything besides a rocky hilltop at the end of an increasingly steep incline.

"Are those stairs?" he asked, squinting into the distance.

"Ah, yes. I hope you're up for a little climb?" said Lupin with a wry grin. "Don't worry. We won't have to go all the way to the top, only about a quarter of the way."

"What's Spyer's Spire?" Harry asked in lieu of answering. They were already beginning their ascent.

"It's this invisible tower at the top of Vertex Alley. Bit of a tourist trap," Lupin told him. "We can visit it if you like."

"No. That's all right," Harry hunched forward as gravity began to assert itself at an unpleasant angle. A gaggle of teenaged girls passed them, strolling along as if on perfectly flat ground. Harry stared after them with incredulity. Lupin caught his look and smiled.

"They're wearing moon shoes," he explained, leaning in. "Make you very light on your feet. But you've got to be careful not to stomp too hard or you'll bounce right off the ground."

Harry continued to watch them for a few moments, but none of them bounced away, so he focused on keeping his own balance as they reached the steepest part before the outright steps began.

Just when he started panting in earnest and misting up his glasses, Lupin steered him to the right, onto the exposed root of what had to be a tree of titanic proportions. Harry quickly wiped his lenses on his cloak and shoved them back onto his face to have a look around. Craning his neck, he tried to see where the branches even started, but his view was obscured by the thick criss-crossing canopy of the comparatively smaller trees that lined the alley, all bedecked with dazzling fairy lights in a rainbow of hues.

"There's Latter Alley," said Lupin, gesturing towards the gaping maw that had been carved into the giant tree's trunk. A lamplit hollow on the first floor gave the impression of a monstrous winking face. Somehow, despite its jagged smile, it seemed welcoming.

"This is brilliant," Harry said. "I can't believe I didn't know about this place before."

As they passed through the mouth into the tree proper, he marvelled at the glittering orange stones that had been set into the walls and ceiling to serve as illumination. Of course—open flame would have hardly been appropriate next to so much wood.

"It's small," said Lupin. "More of a thoroughfare than its own destination, but it's got a few good spots. Honeydukes, of course, and the library."

"There's a library?" Harry demanded. "How did I not know about this before?"

But the library wasn't like the muggle public library, nor like the library at Hogwarts. The sign over the front door read, 'Athenaeum of the Alleys,' and below it, in all capitals, 'MEMBERS ONLY'.

"How do you become a member?" Harry asked.

"There's a subscription fee," said Lupin, "Or you can donate something they don't already have to get in for free, but the main sponsors have to approve it, and they decide how much time it's worth, so it can be a bit tricky. It's worth it, though. You can't take any books out, but you can take as many notes as you like, or even make duplicates if your wandwork is up to scratch. They have a lot of rare and unique tomes in their collection."

"How much is the fee?" Harry asked.

Lupin grimaced apologetically. "Twenty galleons a year, or three hundred for a lifetime. It's probably better to go the book donation route."

Harry winced. "And how do you know if they haven't got a book?"

"Anything old and handwritten is a likely bet. Back in the day we sneaked a few Black heirloom grimoires out from under Sirius's mum's nose to buy me lifetime access," Lupin said, smirking. "They didn't ask any questions."

Old and handwritten—that gave Harry an idea. "Does it have to be in English?"

"Probably not," said Lupin, "though you might get less time if it's in a language other members are unlikely to know. Why, have you got something?"

"I have this book I picked up from a junk shop. It's in Old English or something. It's about… ghosts," he said, deciding not to mention the inferi. "It's not like you really lose anything by giving up a book, right? You can go in and read it whenever you want. Or even make a copy first."

Lupin nodded, looking amused. "Let's not get carried away. We came here for sweets, didn't we?"

"Right," said Harry, a little chagrined at the realisation that he had forgotten sweets in favour of books. If he wasn't careful, he would find himself waking up mounted to the Ravenclaw knocker.

Harry had never been inside a physical Honeydukes store before. Unlike Sugarplum's, where everything was arranged in austere glass cases like at a museum, Honeydukes was bursting floor to ceiling with open wooden bins full of sweets. Everything from Fizzing Whizbees to Ice Mice to Sugar Quills could be grabbed by the handful and purchased by weight, three sickles and seven knuts a pound. Other, larger confections that came in boxes, like chocolate frogs and Bertie Bott's Beans, were simply priced at a sickle each.

Harry scooped up something from each bin (except for the one with cockroach clusters, which nobody liked), figuring that he would go for variety. Out of the corner of his eye, he noted Lupin going to the counter with a pair of Honeyduke's brand chocolate bars. He quickly added a few to the pile balanced precariously in his arms, to send the werewolf later as thanks for taking him out. At the end, after a few moments of dithering, he tossed a handful of Blood Pops on top as well.

The witch behind the counter regarded him with a glazed look as he unloaded a cascade of sweets in front of her. She blew a dolphin-shaped bubble with her Drooble's Best, which floated into the air to join a menagerie of other blue bubblegum animals, before she waved her wand to count up the total.

"That'll be eight sickles and twenty-three knuts," she said, "Would you like a bag for that? It'll be another knut."

"Yes, please," Harry said, and she swept his purchases into a cloth sack with her arm. It bulged all over, clearly not charmed with any kind of extension charm, and Harry had some trouble feeding it into his pocket.

"That wasn't too bad," Harry told Lupin cheerfully as they exited the shop, having expected to spend upwards of a galleon at Sugarplum's. He took out a blood pop and shucked off the wrapper, sticking it in his mouth. It didn't wake him up like real blood, but the sugary, metallic taste was pleasant nonetheless. "Want one?" he asked Lupin, holding out another.

"Is that a blood pop?" Lupin asked, bemused. Harry nodded.

"They're pretty good."

Lupin accepted the sweet and gave it a hesitant lick. "Not bad," he agreed, popping it into his mouth and smiling slyly with the stick poking out of his teeth. "Does it enhance my image as a bloodthirsty beast?"

"No," Harry said, laughing at his exaggerated lisp.

"James used to sneak these into my bag when I wasn't looking," Lupin said, sighing fondly. "And cockroach clusters too. I'd banish them right back into his things, of course. Some of them probably circulated for years."

"Does anybody actually eat cockroach clusters?" Harry asked, making a face. Even Vince wouldn't go near them, and that said a lot.

"Sirius would on occasion, just to be disgusting," Lupin said with a choked laugh. "Merlin, I should have known he would turn out to be a nutter."

A melancholy look passed over his face, so Harry tried to change the subject. "Is there a bookstore around here? I need to get my other friend something. She's in Gryffindor, but she reads more than all the Ravenclaws combined."

Lupin chuckled. "Reminds me of me," he said. "I don't know about a nearby bookstore… Obscurus Books might actually be the closest one."

Harry groaned. Obscurus was all the way on the northern side of Knockturn Alley, and he had no idea where they were now, but they must have walked at least twenty minutes in a different direction.

"Come on," said Lupin, grinning mischievously, "We can go through Corkscrew Avenue."

Harry swallowed another groan and nodded. If Lupin was up to taking him, who was he to complain?

Corkscrew Avenue went around the hill under Spyer's Spire, rather than straight up it like Vertex Alley did, so fortunately the meandering walk wasn't too rough. Harry was astonished when the street plateaued at the next juncture, right under a sign welcoming them to Horizont Alley. The Fountain of Fair Fortune burbled merrily in the distance. An attempt to map out their route in his head failed miserably, so Harry just accepted it and managed to finish the rest of his Christmas shopping in good time.

"If you're serious about donating that book you mentioned to the athenaeum, just give me another floo call and I'll take you there," Lupin reminded him.

"Thanks," Harry said, having forgotten about his earlier idea entirely. After they parted ways, he almost rushed to dig the book out of his trunk, but reconsidered when he was faced with the inviting sight of his unmade bed. The library could wait.


	53. Patient

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a somewhat darker chapter. See the end notes for content warnings if you want them.

Christmas morning dawned cold and crisp as the pale sun climbed its way into a clear blue sky. The roads were still icy from the previous week's sleet, but Lupin knew a dozen spells for preventing slippage and delivered him home from the athenaeum in perfect working order. They had accepted his book on inferi for review, and the bloke at the desk had given him an estimate of a year's subscription, which was pretty good considering he had bought it for thirteen sickles. He didn't really care, as long as it would give him access through the summer holidays, when he planned to take proper advantage of it.

When he arrived at the coffin, there was an assortment of packages sitting on the door. Harry grinned and gathered them up excitedly in his arms before he realised something that twisted his face into consternation. He nudged the lid open and descended. Petri was in the back of the room, working on his experimental wands, though he glanced up as Harry entered.

"How come owls can find us when you've put the fidelius charm on the coffin?" Harry asked, depositing the presents on the table.

"The same way owls can find you even though your identity is a secret. Owls don't care what your name or address is. They simply sense the direction in which the intended recipient is located. As long as the sender is reasonably familiar with both you and the owl, there shouldn't be any problems. Of course, if you no longer wish to receive mail, or if somebody charms you to turn away owls, then they will be unable to deliver to you," Petri explained.

"Owls are magical, then?" Harry asked.

"Owls are enchanted," Petri corrected. "Enchanting living creatures is an entire field of its own, though regrettably one in which I have only limited experience."

He turned back to his project, so Harry began opening the colourful packages on the table. The first one was wrapped in white paper with glittering silver snowflakes dancing softly back and forth. He undid its golden ribbon gingerly before peeling back the spellotaped edges. This was the promised hat from Hannah. He held it out appreciatively in front of him, pressing his thumbs into the soft cotton and comparing it to the scarf around his neck. It was the same dark blue overall, but decorated with pale, tessellating bird silhouettes.

Setting it to the side, Harry picked up the next present, which was in a cube-shaped box about the size of his hand, tied with a green ribbon but otherwise not wrapped. It came away easily with a tug. He opened it and found a large metal sphere, perfectly smooth and shiny like a Christmas ornament, which he supposed must be some mysterious artefact from Vince. Eyeing it doubtfully, he picked it up.

"Ow! Bloody hell!"

A stabbing pain radiated through his hand, and he tried instinctively to fling the object away, but it was stuck. For a moment, he stared in incomprehension at the hooked spikes spearing through his palm. Then his vision swam, and his ears filled with angry buzzing.

"Scheiße!" he heard from somewhere above him. His head cleared for long enough that he noticed he was on the floor. How had he got there? He tried to look at his burning hand and promptly felt bile rising in his throat. It had turned black and shrivelled. The blackness was spreading, slowly but surely, up his wrist.

" _Interitum prohibeo! Ferula! Mobilicorpus!_ " Petri was casting urgently. White bandages snaked tightly around Harry's forearm as he was lifted into the air. Petri ran out of the coffin house and surged across the cemetery at speed, cursing impatiently as the chains on the gate took their time to slither open.

A flash of black streaked out of the shadow of the gate, resolving into a snarling Silviu.

Petri didn't miss a beat—he lowered Harry onto the grass and whipped his wand around, showering the vampire with roses.

"Out of my way, Vlaicu," he said, already pulling Harry back into his movement charm as the gate swung open.

"What do you think you're doing to Harry?" Silviu shouted after him, apparently actually stalled by the flowers. Harry craned his head back and saw that he was vanishing them one by one, one hand clapped over his mouth.

Harry thought Petri might ignore the vampire and keep running, but he slowed long enough to answer, "Saving his life. You can't help. Stay away."

He didn't wait to discover Silviu's response, coursing down Knockturn at a sprint. Harry moaned incoherently. He wasn't sure if he had lost feeling in his hand, or if it simply hurt so much that he could no longer distinguish pain from its absence.

"What's wrong with my hand?" he demanded hoarsely.

Petri did not cease his movement, but angled himself slightly and said, "Flesh-rotting curse of some sort. I'm getting help."

A curse. The ball had been cursed. Harry shut his eyes. Vince was thick sometimes, but how could be so stupid as to send him a literal dark artefact?

He felt ill, whether because of the curse or the realisation that of course, this couldn't have been an accident. Vince was trying to kill him. Vince had been trying to kill him all along. It wasn't Draco who had collapsed the ceiling on Halloween, obviously. Vince was the only one who knew where he would have been. Vince was the one who had started off practising dark magic in empty classrooms, and one did not practise such spells for use on furniture.

But why? Harry's head spun. Lord Voldemort. Vince's family—Neville had mentioned it before—Vince's family had supported the Dark Lord, and most likely still did, and as far as they knew, Lord Voldemort had ordered Harry's death. But how could Vince have been such a consummate actor? Had he secretly hated Harry the whole time they had spent together, after everything Harry had done to help him? It was unbelievable, impossible.

Harry gasped, eyes snapping open. "The _fidelius_ charm," he croaked. "The _fidelius_ charm!"

"What?" Petri panted, slowing as he sidled up a flight of familiar narrow steps. Harry had just been past it earlier in the morning—it was the way to Lupin's flat.

"My friend—he didn't know who I was. He didn't know I was Harry Potter, and he was trying to kill Harry Potter. But he wasn't trying to kill me." The words tumbled urgently from his lips. They had to be said. It was the only way. The alternative was too terrible to countenance.

Petri obviously had no idea what he was talking about. He spared Harry a bemused look as he banged on Lupin's door.

"Remus, come out here. It's an emergency," he shouted. The door rattled, and there was the snick of a deadbolt. Lupin peered out. His eyes widened at the sight of Harry, and he pulled back to admit them.

"Joachim, what's happening?" he whispered harshly, shutting the door behind them.

"Harry's been cursed with something nasty. I've contained it for now but he'll need a potion to counter it. You need to call Severus." Petri said.

Lupin glanced to Harry's hand and flinched. "Why not take him to St Mungo's?"

"And wait for hours while his condition deteriorates?" Petri said. "It's not a generic curse. They won't have anything on hand to combat it."

"What makes you think I can get a hold of Severus any better than you can?" Lupin asked. "I would wager he is less likely to listen to me."

"You have access to Dumbledore's floo," Petri said. "Use it."

"I hardly think—"

"Harry Potter's life is in danger from a dark curse," he snarled. "Alert Dumbledore, tell him to send Severus here straightaway."

Lupin reeled, then nodded, running to his shabby fireplace, his wand spitting a spark into the grate, where it caught into a feeble flame. Petri sighed deeply, dragging his sleeve over his brow. He levitated Harry onto the threadbare couch.

"Hold out your arm," he said. Harry did so, sucking in a harsh breath as the movement sent a jolt of agony through the limb. He shut his eyes, unable to look at the grotesque sight of his blackened, misshapen hand, still impaled on the spiked sphere and leaking putrid blood. He thought he could smell the rot, nauseating and sickly sweet in the back of his throat.

Petri muttered incantations under his breath for a minute straight, then went silent. Harry cracked an eye open and saw that he was still passing his wand back and forth over his outstretched arm like a baton.

"He's coming through," Lupin reported. The dim flat was cast in an eerie green light as somebody spun out of the floo with a swish and thud.

"Where's the brat?" Snape's disdainful drawl was unmistakable.

"Here," said Petri.

Snape's hooked nose rounded the end of the couch. He sneered. "What is the meaning of this? Albus said it was Harry Potter."

"The _fidelius_ charm," Harry said again, looking entreatingly at Petri. "Can we get rid of it? It's just getting in the way, and the Dark Lord knows anyway."

"Now is not the time to be making such a decision," Petri admonished, but a look of unease crept onto his face at Snape's open hostility and Lupin's clear bewilderment.

"What nonsense are you wasting my time with? Where is he?" Snape demanded.

"A child is in need of your aid," Petri told him, but Snape's expression only grew uglier.

"I am only here for _Potter_." He spat the name like a curse.

"Please," Harry said. "End the _fidelius_."

Petri stared Snape levelly in the eye for another long moment before he looked to Harry. "Very well. Rosenkol!"

The elf appeared with a crack.

"Excuse him from his duty as your secret keeper," Petri told Harry.

"Okay. Rosenkol…" Harry began uncertainly, "I excuse you from keeping my secret."

Professor Snape immediately swore. Harry stared at him wide-eyed and was met with a searing glare. "Not a word." He glanced down and grimaced at the sight of Harry's arm, taking his wand out.

"It's a flesh-rotting curse, combined with some sort of alchemical inhibitor. Furthermore, I believe it it is interacting poorly with the vampire's curse," Petri reported. Snape clenched his teeth so hard Harry thought they might shatter.

"I suppose the dark artefact cannot be removed?" Snape asked.

"It appears to be one use only," Petri said. "I left it for convenience."

Snape cast a slew of wordless spells at Harry's arm, then swore again. "Keep him alive for another forty minutes. I shall brew something to break the inhibitor. Here." He thrust a vial into Petri's hand. "Pain relief."

Harry had forgotten that he was in pain, really, constant as it was. If the cruciatus curse had one good thing about it, it was that it put all other pains in perspective. Still, the effect of drinking the potion was obvious—his entire body felt like it had been dipped in a cool bath. Aches from tension he had not even been aware of seeped from his muscles.

Snape disappeared through the floo, and all was silent. Lupin stood at the end of the couch, staring uncomfortably at Harry. Harry, feeling awkward, accustomed himself to the sight of his hand, which was now completely shrivelled and black. He laid it carefully on a lumpy pillow.

"So… how does this curse work?" Harry asked. Rotting somebody's flesh seemed like a pretty difficult exercise.

Petri sighed, putting on his lecture tone. "The flesh-rotting curse injects a large quantity of foreign magic into the tissue, causing the affected area to die. Normally your body would resist the effect and suffer only a small lesion, but this particular artefact was also designed to stop other magic from reaching the area to combat the curse, which renders it highly dangerous and impossible to counter with wandwork alone."

Lupin shot him an incredulous look. He turned to Harry and said, "Once Severus gets back with the counter potion, you'll be just fine."

"Actually," Petri said, causing Lupin to choke, "There may be further complications. It seems like the vampire's curse is working to keep your hand animated. Animated, however, is quite different from alive—perhaps even the opposite, and I worry that healing magic will be ineffective."

"We don't know that," Lupin said, brimming with reproach. "At least take him to St Mungo's after Severus returns."

"I plan to," Petri agreed. "We shall also have to pay the Auror Office a visit. This is certainly a case of affliction by a dark artefact, if not attempted murder."

Harry found it hilarious that Petri wanted to report dark magic to the aurors. "There's no point," he said. "We know who it was."

"If you have an idea of who the sender is, the aurors will be able to investigate and bring them to justice," said Lupin.

"Oh yes, the aurors will go out and arrest the Dark Lord," Harry muttered, rolling his eyes.

"The Dark Lord cannot have sent you something by owl post. It must have been one of his followers, somebody who could identify you, and the aurors certainly should be alerted to such a bold-faced crime," Petri said, turning to pace up and down the sparse room.

Harry remembered that Petri still did not know that he had met the Dark Lord not once, but multiple times. Voldemort probably _could_ send him a letter, if he so wished.

"I know who sent it. It's not their fault," Harry said, closing his eyes. "You can't just say no to the Dark Lord."

"Harry," Lupin murmured, a pained look on his face, "There are plenty of people who fight against Lord Voldemort. He isn't unstoppable. Your parents fought against him."

"My parents are dead," Harry said, though he knew it was a low blow. They were Harry's parents, and certainly he mourned the idea of them, but he knew they had been the werewolf's friends. Lupin flinched, his eyes shuttering.

"Because Lord Voldemort murdered them. That's even more reason not to give him any quarter. Lord Voldemort is only powerful because people tell themselves that they're powerless. Following him is a choice, which people can and should be held accountable for. It's a choice between what's easy, and what's right."

Harry felt those words like a punch to his chest. He pursed his lips and looked down, trying to keep his expression steady. His momentary shame was soon replaced by hot indignation. What did Lupin know? He was simply wrong. Lord Voldemort was powerful because he literally was better at magic than other people. This so-called choice was between continuing to live and being 'right' in some nebulous, undefined sense. Harry would choose living every time, thank you very much, and anybody who would do otherwise in his situation was barking mad. How could he blame Vince, who was twelve years old like him and not even as good at magic, for following his family and the Dark Lord? It would be the height of hypocrisy.

Still, his heart stung at the thought. He wasn't sure he could face Vince any time soon, certainly not next week. He didn't know if he wanted to see any of his friends. It felt like the floor had been pulled out from under him. Anybody could be working under false pretences or be under the imperius curse—he himself was under the imperius curse, something which he would do well not to forget. The only thing he could trust, ironically enough, was the Dark Lord's word that he didn't want Harry dead yet. That Lord Voldemort had spared his life again when he had had every opportunity to end it was solid proof of his intentions.

"It's not very polite to burden someone with weighty moralising while they're down," Petri said with a thin-lipped grimace. Lupin glared at him, but kept his silence.

"How long until Snape gets back?" Harry asked, feeling a little light-headed. He wet his lips, finding them hopelessly cracked. The phantom beginnings of pain were returning to his afflicted hand.

Petri glanced at the tip of his wand. "Thirty minutes still. I suppose I should start studying the countercurse. _Accio Compendium_."

With a pop, the _Complete Compendium of Charms_ materialised in midair. It remained hovering there as he paged through it with casual flicks of his wand.

Harry leaned back and closed his eyes, hoping to fall asleep. After several minutes, however, it became undeniable that a burning feeling was returning to his hand.

"I think the pain potion is wearing off," he said, opening his eyes to find Lupin staring at him in concern.

"It's supposed to last for an hour," said the werewolf, frowning deeply.

"Where does it hurt?" Petri asked, drawing incredulous looks.

"My hand," Harry deadpanned.

Petri shook his head. "Your hand shouldn't be hurting at all. The nerves are most certainly dead by now. It must be as I feared—magical pain, from the vampire's curse. The potion can do nothing against that. Is the pain spreading further up your arm?"

Harry bit his lip, glancing to his unsightly limb. There were spots of black peppered across his wrist, which he couldn't be sure had not expanded. The burning radiated through his whole right side, but he thought it was mostly residual shock from the searing epicentre.

"I don't think so," he finally said. Petri cast some spells at him anyway.

"The containment seems to be holding," he agreed.

They lapsed back into silence. Harry tried and failed to sleep again. After some time, the fire roared with green flame and Snape came spinning out, a large goblet balanced impeccably in his grip. It couldn't have been forty minutes.

"That was quick," Petri remarked. Snape sneered at him.

"I thought it best not to take my time, given the circumstances," he said, passing the steaming potion over the back of the couch. Harry gripped it tightly with his left hand. "Drink up."

The potion was slimy and tasted like spiced snot. A horrid, sulphurous residue clung to his palate and throat, and Harry had to hold his breath to avoid heaving it all back up. The effect was not immediate, but after about a minute, during which three pairs of eyes bored into him with anticipation, he began to feel jittery and focused all at once, as if he had just drunk blood.

He yelled as his hand suddenly erupted in renewed agony. Petri caught his flailing arm by the elbow and immobilised him with his wand. Harry found himself sticky with cold sweat and panting, his heart beating furiously in its cage.

" _Expungo!_ " Petri cast, bathing Harry's hand in a soft green light.

"Did it work?" Harry asked. Petri pursed his lips and cast structure sight on himself.

"The curse appears to be gone," he concluded. Harry glanced at his still blackened hand. "But I have no expertise in healing."

"Allow me to make an attempt," said Professor Snape. He extracted the cursed artefact from Harry's palm with a careful movement charm, encasing it in a translucent bubble and letting it float to the side. " _Afflictio sanetur,_ " he sang in a strong baritone, brushing his wand tip over the leathery flesh. Some of the lesions dotting Harry's wrist faded, but his hand remained black as ever, and the holes from the spikes did not close. Snape's face was grim.

"St Mungo's, then?" Petri asked. Snape nodded curtly. "I suppose it would be safest to go the muggle way."

Snape hummed at the back of his throat. "It's Christmas Day. The Underground won't be running. He'll survive a side-along apparition, and well, there will be healers on the other side if he splinches."

"You can't be serious! Apparating with injuries is reckless," Lupin began.

"Quiet, Lupin. Your opinion is unwanted," Snape snarled.

Petri snorted, turning to Harry. "Can you stand?"

Weary of being treated like an invalid—it was his hand that was cursed, not his legs—Harry sprang to his feet, regretting it immediately as his vision darkened and he swayed on his feet. He threw out his arm involuntarily, saved only from shoving his injured hand into the couch by Petri's quick charmwork, which tugged him back by his collar.

"Hold on tightly," Petri said, taking his left hand.

Thus Harry discovered why it was inadvisable to apparate while injured. He emerged on the other side gasping in agony, his lower arm feeling like it had been twisted off. A frantic check told him that it was still there in its desiccated glory, and so were the remainder of his body parts. They had arrived inside what appeared to be an empty shop floor, lit only by sunlight streaming in through a display window, in front of which stood two dummies in dresses that looked like they would have been outdated a decade ago.

Petri dragged him over to one of the dummies, which was clad in a green pinafore and an ugly ribbon hat.

"We're here for spell damage," he said brusquely. The chipped, painted face turned ever so slightly in a small nod. The next step they took was like popping a bubble—the noise of chatter surged into the room, which had transformed into a waiting area equipped with creaky old chairs and even older stacks of _Witch Weekly_. Petri tugged Harry right past the queue in front of a desk marked 'Inquiries,' glancing at a placard on the wall briefly before taking them through a set of double doors.

The sound cut off again. They had emerged in a cramped passageway lined on both sides with portraits of witches and wizards in lime green robes.

"Oh, nasty curse there! You'll be needing a debridement draught for that," said a square-faced old man.

"A good Werther's Restoration will fix it right up," commented a witch with a very pointed noise.

"You old fools need your eyes checked. It's obviously a serious case of gangrene," another portrait said, sneering. Petri ignored all of them and ushered Harry up the stairs.

They encountered real healers in the same green robes as well, rushing about with purpose. These thankfully did not stop to randomly offer diagnoses, only glancing over briefly to see that Petri seemed to know where he was going.

"Where are we going?" Harry asked as they mounted yet another flight of stairs.

"Fourth floor. Spell damage," Petri said, turning sharply. Indeed, they had arrived in front of another set of double doors marked with that exact placard. He pulled open the doors and gestured for Harry to precede him.

The corridor on the other side extended farther than the eye could see. To their left was a window, behind which sat a sulky wizard with dimples.

"This is the spell damage ward," he said, gaze unfocused. "What sort of ailment are you experiencing?"

Harry held up his hand, and the wizard jumped in his seat, now wide awake.

"Lethal curse damage," Petri said.

"Right, that's down the hall and to the left, ward fifty, Harry Potter ward," the wizard told them. Harry choked at hearing the name, whereupon the wizard's eyes widened. "Blimey, you're Harry Potter!"

He was already regretting letting the _fidelius_ lapse. At the time, he had been thinking about its effect on his friends and enemies, and not… this.

"Yeah, thanks," he muttered, fighting the urge to sprint down the hall and ignoring the wizard's calls to wait. Petri overtook him with his long stride, shooting him a sidelong smirk.

"I suppose they named it after you for your miraculous survival of the killing curse," he said.

"Would be ironic if I kicked the bucket now, wouldn't it?" Harry muttered.

They followed the reception wizard's instructions and proceeded down the hall, turning left. They passed the doors to two other wards, Markalay Lang and Janus Thickey, before finding a door marked 'Harry Potter' at the end.

"Harry?" a familiar voice called suddenly from behind them. Harry whirled around to see Neville emerging from the Janus Thickey ward, followed by a severe witch in a hat adorned with a stuffed vulture.

"Friend of yours, Neville?" asked the witch, who Harry figured must be Neville's legendarily strict grandmother. He'd heretofore only glimpsed her at a distance, and she cut an even more imposing figure up close, despite her eccentric wardrobe.

"Harry Potter," Harry introduced, effectively, for the first time in years. Mrs Longbottom's eyes glittered with recognition.

"Yes, of course," she said. "Neville speaks your praises incessantly. He was positively glowing about the remembrall modifier you gifted him."

At her side, Neville was turning all interesting shades, having first paled and then gone rapidly pink. His eyes were fixed on the slightly scuffed tips of his shoes.

"Oh. Thanks. I'm glad," Harry said, feeling a pang of disappointment that he hadn't even been able to open Neville's present. At least whatever it was probably wouldn't have tried to murder him. Petri coughed unsubtly in the background.

"My goodness," Mrs Longbottom exclaimed, catching sight of his withered hand, "We certainly do not mean to keep you from the healers."

Neville had finally looked up, only to immediately blanch. "Merlin, Harry, what happened to your hand?"

Harry wasn't sure how to answer this question, but was saved by Mrs Longbottom.

"Neville! Don't interrogate the poor boy. Come along now," she said. To Harry, she added, "I hope we can meet again under more pleasant circumstances."

"I'll tell you later," Harry called after Neville's retreating figure.

Petri, who had hung back by the door, opened it now to usher Harry impatiently inside. The room they had entered was narrow, so that the ends of opposing beds might have touched had they not been offset. It was also somewhat dingy, lit by a single cluster of enchanted lights and weak sunlight from a frosted window. Only one bed on the far end was occupied, the curtain drawn. Harry supposed living victims of lethal curses weren't exactly an everyday phenomenon.

A tall witch who had been sitting at a desk beside the door sprung to her feet as they entered, hurrying around it to meet them.

"Hello, this is the lethal curses ward. I'm Healer Morwell," she said, scanning them both with clear grey eyes, which landed first on Harry's forehead and then on his arm. "What's happened here?"

Petri explained the situation succinctly. Morwell looked aghast, but moved immediately to action.

"All right, Mr Potter, please make yourself as comfortable as you can," she said, directing him to the bed clear across the room on the opposite corner from the ward's other occupant. "I know you've said the curse has been countered, but just to be safe I'm going to have you drink this potion. It will isolate any remaining magical effects and prevent them from spreading. It will also make you very drowsy."

Hearing this, Harry took off his glasses and put them on the side table, settling back into the somewhat rickety hospital bed. Healer Morwell passed him a vial of bright violet potion. It smelled faintly of rosemary, and for a change did not taste too disgusting, resembling mildly curdled milk.

Drowsy was an understatement. Moments after downing the potion, his eyes felt like they would drop out of his head if he failed to close them, and his limbs melted into limp jelly.

When he awoke, the shadows were long, and somebody had changed him into a violet hospital gown and tucked him under the thin covers of the bed, leaving his injured arm exposed. His hand looked no different from before, still black and lifeless. It throbbed with renewed vigour as he lifted it up sluggishly.

There was the scrape of a chair, and hurried footsteps clicked across the lacquered floor. The healer that appeared in his field of vision wasn't Morwell, but a young wizard with pronounced rings under his eyes.

"Ah, hello, Mr Potter. I'm Healer Trainee Lanceley. How are you feeling?" he asked.

Harry considered the question. "Not any better or worse," he finally said. "My hand… are they going to be able to fix it?"

That there had been no apparent improvement at all to the state of his hand seemed to be a bad sign. When the ceiling had collapsed on him at Halloween, even though his legs had been crushed under the stone, Madam Pomfrey had managed to put him almost completely back to rights by the time he had woken up. If there was something they could do, wouldn't they have done it already?

Lanceley's eyebags drooped even further. "We'd like to talk with you and your guardian about treatment options in the morning. For now, are you any pain? Do you think you could get back to sleep without a sleeping draught?"

"My hand burns a bit," Harry said. "I could use that sleeping draught."

This was less because of the pain, and more because he suspected that it was around midnight, so he felt wide awake and refreshed, having basically slept in. It was unlikely that he could just go back to sleep, but staying awake with nothing to do sounded intractably boring. There were no books, and he couldn't practise spells since he was underage and outside of the Alleys.

Also, he realised suddenly, he couldn't practise spells because his wand hand was out of commission. A cold stab of fear lanced through him at the thought. What would he do if they couldn't heal him after all?

He shook the thought away as Lanceley brought him the lavender sleeping draught.

"Take half of this to sleep until morning," the healer recommended. Harry drank the requisite amount and set the rest on the bedside table. He was out before his head hit the pillow.

The first thing he heard as he came back to awareness was Petri's voice, low and angry.

"… unacceptable that there's no custom option."

"I'm sorry, sir, but you'll have to take that up with the Ministry. I don't make the rules," said Healer Morwell. "Mr Potter is awake."

There must have been some kind of alert charm on him, because Harry hadn't moved or opened his eyes. He did so now, shoving himself against the backboard so he could slide into a sitting position.

He checked his hand. Still black.

Petri and the healer, who had been seated at the desk by the door, got up and came over to his bedside.

"Your hand is permanently dead. It will have to be amputated," Petri told him outright. Behind him, Healer Morwell's jaw dropped.

Harry took a moment to assess whether Petri was joking. His face was stone cold, contorted slightly with frustration.

"You can't just say it like that," the healer cried, but her further protests were lost behind the ringing in Harry's ears. He felt physically ill. His mouth hung open for a few moments, trying to swallow air that refused to enter his lungs.

"I can still feel it," he said, instead of vomiting. He wasn't sure what he was trying to argue. He knew exactly why he could still feel it.

"The vampire's curse," Petri confirmed for him, ignoring the appalled healer entirely.

"What if I drink blood?" Harry tried weakly, knowing before he said it that there would be a perfectly reasonable refutation.

"I will not permit you to die for want of a hand," Petri said, sneering. "The curse will not repair your body unless you're dead."

For a wild moment, Harry felt desperate indignation surge in his chest. He'd rather be a vampire than an armless wizard—but then sense asserted itself, reminding him that he would have to kill himself to obtain that outcome. He grit his teeth and shut his eyes, feeling a suspicious wetness tingling at their corners.

He took a breath, trying to focus. "They can't grow it back?" he hated how his voice shook, but he had to ask. Madam Pomfrey had grown back the bones in his legs.

"Dark curses cause permanent damage if they aren't countered in time," Petri said.

"Why didn't you take me to hospital immediately, then?" Harry demanded.

Petri's lip curled slightly, but he nodded to Healer Morwell, who was looking on helplessly. "St Mungo's does not keep anti-preservative potions on hand. Severus provided you the fastest treatment you could have received."

Harry slumped against the headboard, understanding that it was unreasonable to argue further, though denial still racked his shuddering chest. He closed his eyes. "Will I still be able to do magic?"

Petri's face twisted into an ugly grimace. "I might have been able to create for you a prosthesis as good or even better than a real hand, had the Ministry not instituted an asinine rule that prostheses are to be considered magical artefacts. As such, you must choose from a standard selection of frankly inferior models. If I were to design something for you, it would have to be approved by the Artificer's Office, which could take up to a year. In the mean time, you'll have to learn to cast left-handed."

Magical prostheses—Harry felt a little better at hearing that—he'd originally imagined simply going around with a stump or a hook like a fantasy pirate, which would have been less than ideal.

"My friend's dad works for the Artificer's Office. Maybe…" Harry began, then remembered that this same friend's father was probably the mastermind behind this plan to kill him. He wasn't sure if all this meant that an approval was more or less likely to be forthcoming. "Never mind. What kind of prostheses are there?"

"You're taking this quite well," Healer Morwell interjected, apparently finally having regained her wits.

"Well?" Harry repeated tonelessly. He still felt on the edge of vomiting, and hadn't completely ruled out suicide. He wanted to scream more at Petri, or throw things, even if he might receive a lashing for his trouble—physical pain would be welcome over the horror churning in his gut—but the healer was there, her presence like a suffocating weight. So he cleared his mind as was by now habit and said, "I suppose so."

She smiled at him. He hated the ugly wrinkle it caused on her face, full of something that was only a step to the right of condescension—pity. Harry turned back to Petri, who at least made no disguise of sympathy. He simply wanted the best for Harry, because Harry's health was in his self interest. This attitude at least, Harry felt was acceptable.

"Here's the prostheses pamphlet," Healer Morwell said, passing a folded piece of parchment to Harry. He opened it to find descriptions of a dozen models of magical hand.

"You only really have two options," Petri said, indicating them on the page. "The hand must be wooden if you're to have any hope of channeling magic through it, and it should be free of any but the most basic animation charms."

"Mr Peters, I should think that the poor boy wouldn't want to go around with a clunky wooden hand. There are plenty of modern options with more realistic weight and appearance," the healer protested.

Petri looked at Harry meaningfully, and Harry gave a small nod of understanding. He wanted something without extra charms so that they could charm it themselves, Artificer's Office be damned. Surprisingly, this thought made him feel somewhat better about the whole prospect. Perhaps his hand could be made to do something wicked, like shoot fire out of its fingertips.

The two options were a mechanical hand that looked like a marionette's, all wooden except for the pewter joints, and another which had the exact shape of a human hand but had the texture of a tree branch. Harry supposed the second one was made by transfiguration.

"I like this one," Harry said, tapping the mechanical hand. When the healer looked dissatisfied, he couldn't help snidely adding, "It's my hand."

Still, all his bravado evaporated into sick trepidation as the healer passed him the rest of his sleeping draught. They would perform the procedure while he was unconscious, and a specialist would be called in the next day to fit his prosthesis.

Harry took a last, mournful look at his hand. It was shrivelled, soggy, and grotesque, but the thought of it just being _not there_ still made his pulse quicken in horror. His eyes burned, and he shut them tightly. He wouldn't cry. Before he could work himself into a worse state, he tipped the potion back and slumped back, dead to the world.

Raised voices were the first thing that filtered into his groggy consciousness as he came to once more. "Do you know who I am?" somebody demanded in a reedy tenor.

"Yes, Minister. I don't care who you are, this is a private ward and you can't just come barging in as you please." That was a very frayed Healer Morwell. Harry forced his eyes open. His heart skipped a beat when he remembered what was supposed to have happened, and he shoved himself upright, pawing at the side table for his glasses and shoving them onto his face. He looked at his other arm.

No hand, as promised, only a smooth stump where his wrist would have begun. A wave of vertigo passed over him. He vaguely heard the clatter of approaching footsteps.

"Mr Potter, how are you feeling?" asked the healer in a gentle voice.

"Dizzy," Harry mumbled. His insides churned.

"Here, drink this," Healer Morwell said, pressing a glass of bluish liquid into his left hand. "Diluted calming draught. It will settle your stomach and your head."

"Mr Potter!" A portly, greying man in a pinstriped cloak and a lime green bowler hat had barged into the room, flanked by two severe-looking aurors. "Very good, you're awake. I must say, it's been quite difficult to get an audience with you."

"I must ask you to leave, sir. Mr Potter isn't well enough to be taking visitors, much less the press," Healer Morwell ground out, whirling around. She looked back and forth between the two aurors helplessly, her hand fisting her robes. Harry felt his opinion of her rise a little, even as he worked frantically to figure out what was going on. Minister? The press? Was this the _Minister_ _for_ _Magic_?

The thought seemed ludicrous until the man stepped forward and held out his hand, introducing himself as, "Cornelius Fudge, the Minister for Magic. Don't worry. I've instructed the aurors not to let any reporters past the lobby."

Feeling nervous laughter about to bubble out of his mouth, Harry forced it down with a swig of his calming draught. He suddenly found Fudge to be quite ridiculous, so he held out his new stump. The Minister looked very awkward and withdrew his hand.

"Apologies, Mr Potter, we at the Ministry heard about your accident and wanted to offer our sympathies," he said.

Hold on. "Accident?" Harry repeated. "It wasn't an accident. I was attacked, sent a cursed artefact." He felt a rush of annoyance, and a somewhat disproportionate desire to spring out of the bed. He sat up straighter instead.

"Please, Minister, you're riling up my patient. Please come back later," Healer Morwell entreated, no avail.

"It'll be just a moment, my dear witch. I don't see the boy himself kicking up a fuss," said the Minister. "Perhaps you could give us a moment alone?"

That was because the calming draught was muting his emotions, Harry thought, or he probably would have been apoplectic. It felt a little bit like being inside Lord Voldemort's head. Harry calmed even further as he had the thought—it was an empowering one.

Besides, Healer Morwell was channelling his indignation for him. "This is _my ward_." She was almost yelling. "My patient. He is not well. I can't simply leave him alone with strangers."

"We're hardly strangers, now. We've been introduced," said Minister Fudge gently. "Just a moment and we'll be out of your hair."

One of the aurors behind him took a rather threatening step forward. The healer bristled, but finally shot an uncertain look at Harry, who, seized by some unknown whimsy, toasted her with his half-empty potion glass. She sighed deeply and strode over to her desk, sitting down and fixing a dark glare on the intruders.

The auror to Fudge's left cast a spell on the ground, causing a subtle shift in the ambiance. Harry supposed it was some kind of privacy charm.

"Now, Harry—may I call you Harry?" the minister began. Harry shrugged. "We've investigated the situation and determined that the artefact responsible for your injury was mistakenly sent to you."

"They must have been trying to murder somebody else, you mean?" Harry said, feeling another prickle of annoyance, the sort that would have made the Dark Lord raise his wand with the cruciatus curse on his lips. Fortunately, that very thought was enough to induce a vague amusement in him.

Minister Fudge did not seem to have anticipated this objection, for he pursed his lips a moment and said, "No, of course not. Nobody was meaning to murder—to hurt anybody. The artefact was submitted anonymously… we're still searching for its origin, but rest assured, we will find it and bring the creator to justice. In any case, it was an experimental artefact, certainly not something that should have been sent to you. The aurors have questioned Mr Crabbe at the Artificer's Office, and you can be assured of his innocence in the matter. He sends his deepest apologies and well-wishes."

Harry might have believed him, had he not had more reason to believe that Mr Crabbe served the Dark Lord. As it was, he said, "Okay. That doesn't change that it was an attack. Whoever made that artefact intended for it to kill somebody."

"Now, we don't know that for certain," said the minister, and Harry was starting to feel his patience run thin. He gulped another generous mouthful of calming draught. "Harry, you don't believe what Dumbledore has been saying about He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, do you?" The minster chuckled nervously.

Harry blinked, losing the thread of the conversation. "Sorry? What does Headmaster Dumbledore have to do with this?"

For some reason, Minister Fudge looked much more cheerful at hearing this. "Right, precisely, Harry. He's got nothing at all to do with it, and neither does He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named."

This declaration only cemented Harry's belief that the Dark Lord's outstanding order was exactly the driving force behind the attempt on his life, and that the Minister for Magic was full of it, under the imperius curse, or both.

For the first time, Harry's gaze slid from the minister to his two guards. One of them was a grizzled man with bristly grey hair cut close to his scalp. The other had a brutish, square jaw and flinty eyes, and wore his long, pale hair in a severe braid. Something about him looked disquietingly familiar, though Harry was sure that they had never met.

"Okay," Harry said flatly, unsure what the minister wanted from him.

"Very good, Harry. I'll get to the point of this visit, then. In the interest of preventing any further… mishaps, we at the Ministry of Magic have decided that it would be prudent to assign an auror for your protection during the remainder of your hospital stay," said Minister Fudge. He nodded to the second auror. "This is Yaxley. He is one of our best."

Yaxley. So this was Annette's infamous father. Harry felt a shiver cascade down his spine, though the potion he was nursing prevented it from escalating into anything more than a chill. He stared searchingly into the auror's cold grey eyes, but found nothing. The man looked bored, and a little impatient.

"Okay. Thanks," Harry mumbled, eyes flickering briefly back to the minister. Definitely under the imperius curse.

"Well, I did promise it would just be a minute, so I'll be taking my leave," said Minister Fudge. "I wish you a speedy recovery."

Harry swallowed the urge to point out that there wasn't going to be a recovery. His hand had been cursed off and couldn't be grown back. He ignored the minister, who was shuffling out of the room with the other auror, electing to keep his eyes on Yaxley instead. The door clicked shut, and they were alone, except for Healer Morwell, who had stood up, wearing a very displeased moue.

Yaxley casually took out his wand and said, " _Imperio_." The healer stopped in her tracks, turned right around, and sat back down, staring ahead blankly.

Harry kicked his blankets aside and swung his legs over the edge of his bed. He glanced briefly at the opposite corner of the room, but found the bed there made and unoccupied. The other patient must have already been discharged. They were alone.

"Are you going to try to kill me too?" he asked Yaxley conversationally. Perhaps Voldemort's aim was to keep him alive but maimed. Would Yaxley curse off his other hand? Harry didn't feel anything at this thought, though he knew it should be disturbing. The potion must have fully kicked in.

"Change of plans," said Yaxley. "The Dark Lord wants you brought in alive."

"Great," said Harry, getting to his feet. He only felt a little weak at the knees and managed to stay standing with some help from the side table. His wand was there—fat lot of good it would do him. He picked it up uncertainly in his left hand. "Can I get dressed first?"

Yaxley cast a switching spell and Harry found him suddenly stuffed into his cold robes. He still wasn't wearing trousers. Pure-bloods. Blinking, he stuffed his wand into his pocket and stepped into his trainers.

As he moved closer, he noticed that Yaxley actually looked a little nonplussed. Harry held out his good hand.

"Are we apparating?" he asked.

"Portkey," Yaxley grunted. He fished a silver bangle from his pocket and tapped it with his wand, muttering something under his breath. The bangle glowed blue for a moment. He held it out. Harry hooked two fingers into it, and Yaxley let go. The portkey glowed brighter this time, whisking Harry away by a hook behind his navel.

Harry landed in a patch of frozen straw, throwing his arms out instinctively to stop his fall but only managing to send a jarring impact up his new stump. Grimacing, he cradled it to his chest as he glanced around. He had arrived on a hilltop, surrounded by gnarled trees and headstones: a graveyard, but not his graveyard. In the distance he could see smoke drifting over the rooftops of a small village.

The Dark Lord was standing in front of a statue of an angel, dressed in plain black robes like a vision of death. He strode over to where Harry had landed.

Harry remained kneeling in the grass. He could find no motivation to move even an inch.

"Harry," said Lord Voldemort, robes fluttering as he knelt down. "Give me your arm."

Harry looked up in confusion, finally simply extending both arms. The corner of the Dark Lord's lipless mouth twitched. He took Harry's stump and scrutinised it for a moment before raising his wand.

Silver mist coalesced at its tip, swirling into the unmistakable shape of a hand. Harry had a second to blink at it in confusion before it lowered itself onto his wrist. He jerked back and howled, clutching at the join. It was like his skin was being flayed off one layer at a time. The pain disappeared a moment later, replaced by a new, yet familiar sensation. Pressure on his wrist. The silver hand twitched. He closed his fingers, opened them, and touched his smooth palm with his other hand. The material had the exact, supple firmness of flesh.

"What?" he said, and then came somewhat to his senses. "Thank you, my lord."

He wasn't sure what to make of this development. Hadn't Petri said that his prosthesis needed to be wooden?

"Cast a spell," said the Dark Lord, straightening up and gesturing for Harry to stand as well.

Harry peered up at him incredulously, but elected to do as he was told. He took out his wand, held it off to the side, and said, " _Lumos_."

The tip flared brightly, casting a steady glow. Harry blinked at it. "How? I thought—they said it couldn't be healed, that I'd have to use my left hand to do magic."

"Do you know why cursed wounds cannot be healed?" asked the Dark Lord, reaching out to trace the lightning-bolt scar on Harry's forehead with a pale finger that cut like a knife's edge. "It is because they scar the soul itself. They force the will of the caster upon the will of the victim, imposing an irrevocable change on their being. The only way to overcome this effect is to lay an even stronger curse."

Harry eyed the silver hand again, considering the Dark Lord's words. A stronger curse. "Does it do something bad?"

The hand closed into a fist without Harry's conscious direction.

"It is my curse, my will, and therefore my hand as much as it is yours," said the Dark Lord. "That is all. Stay true to me, and it will stay true to you."

"I see. Thank you, my lord," Harry said. He thought he might have felt indignant, impressed, or perhaps even grateful without the influence of the calming draught. He couldn't be sure, but he decided that it was nice not to have to be any of those things.

"I admit that it was an oversight on my part that you might be so permanently harmed," said the Dark Lord unexpectedly. "Crabbe has been punished for his abject failure, and I have amended my orders. You are to be brought to me alive and whole, so that I might mark and kill you myself. It will be our little secret."

Harry was still looking at his silver hand. "Won't Dumbledore know what happened when he sees this?"

Lord Voldemort laughed softly. "I am counting on Dumbledore to draw precisely the correct conclusion."

He did not elaborate on what that conclusion was, and Harry saw no reason to ask. In fact, he could see little reason for doing or saying anything, so he simply stood there in silence. The Dark Lord seemed to take his stony lack of reaction quite positively. In the serenity of his own mind, he could he feel the pleasant echo of Lord Voldemort's good cheer.

"You may return to where you were before," said the Dark Lord. Harry stood up unsteadily.

"How?"

"Take the portkey again. It should have been spelled to return." The Dark Lord levitated it from where it lay in the grass. Harry reached out and closed his new fingers around the metal, which was painfully cold. It flared with blue light.

He stumbled onto the hard wooden floor of the hospital, landing on his hands and knees again. This time, the strange silver prosthesis took his weight easily and painlessly. He scrambled to his feet, locating Yaxley immediately—the man stood by the door, arms crossed. Healer Morwell sat behind the desk, occupied with some paperwork. She did not look up.

A surprised look briefly crossed Yaxley's face, and Harry wondered for a moment whether the Dark Lord had told him anything, or if Yaxley was now bewildered at Harry's continued survival, but the man's expression smoothed out as he caught sight of the silver hand. Harry glanced down at it again and had the feeling that the Dark Lord had not been perfectly forthcoming with him.

In fact, he was beginning to have a variety of feelings now, chief among them dread and anger, which began to simmer in the pit of his stomach. The calming draught must be wearing off.

"Go back to bed," Yaxley ordered in a gruff voice. Harry wanted to be contrary, but couldn't think of any valid objection, so trudged over to the bed he had been occupying, doubtfully eyeing the lavender hospital gown that had been laid out across it. He was promptly hit with the switching spell again. Shivering at the sudden chill, he peeled back the covers and scrambled underneath them, curling up into a tight ball. His glasses dug into the side of his face, but he had no desire to resurface so that he could remove them.

The thin blanket did little to block out light. Harry studied his new hand at close range, wiggling all its fingers one by one, rubbing at the scratchy linens, and touching his own face. It felt, in every respect, exactly like his original hand, except that it was distinctly cold to the touch. Despite the temperature difference, the subjective sensations he felt with it were completely synchronised with those of the rest of his body—his breath was still warm, the unexplored edges of the bed cool. When the influence of the calming draught finally drained away, he felt himself wracked with a terribly guilty sense of relief. He was grateful to the Dark Lord, and the very experience of that gratitude twisted at his gut, inviting almost as much indignation. It was the Dark Lord who had indirectly caused his injury in the first place. Surely it was only right that he had done everything he could to restore it.

Harry felt less grateful when, later that morning, Petri stormed past a protesting Yaxley to see him, only for all the blood to drain instantly from his face.

"How did this happen?" he demanded, eyes fixed on the silver hand. He didn't seem angry—Harry recognised his taut lips lips and furrowed brows as the product of fear, which after a moment smoothed into careful disinterest. He listened in stony silence as the healer lied fantastically about how Harry had decided on a different model of prosthesis after all. All the while, Harry stared holes into Petri, wishing for the first time ever that the man knew legilimency as he tried to subtly indicate Yaxley without looking at him. If it was working, then Petri was doing an admirable job of pretending he had seen nothing. He nodded along to the healer as she passed him a sheaf of parchment and explained that Harry would need to make follow-up visits whenever he had a growth spurt to readjust his hand.

Harry felt his lip quirk up unwillingly. Somehow, he doubted that the exacting Dark Lord would have overlooked a detail like that.

Yaxley followed them all the way down to the waiting room, which they discovered was jam-packed with witches and wizards wielding colourful quills and massive cameras. They burst into action at the sight of him in the door, pushing and shoving to get near him, but bounced off a square barrier as Yaxley brandished his wand.

"Mr Potter!" somebody yelled with a sonorus-amplified voice, "Mr Potter, this is Barnabas Cuffe from the _Daily Prophet—_ could you please say a few words about how you are feeling after the horrifying attack on your person?"

"Mr Potter!" a witch with a towering hairstyle shrieked, but her question was swallowed up by a well-aimed silencing spell from Petri.

Cameras flashed left and right, spewing purple smoke everywhere. Some patients waiting in the rickety chairs began to cough uncontrollably. Green-robed healers rushed in to berate the reporters, while Yaxley used his shield as a battering ram to push through the throng.

Finally they were through—with a sucking sensation the front door expelled them into a blessedly silent muggle alley.

"Thank you, sir, but we no longer have need of your services," Petri ground out when it seemed as though Yaxley was ready to side-along apparate back home with them. Harry's hand went to his wand, ready to unleash a point-blank Enemy's Curse if Yaxley so much as indicated any aggression. Thankfully, however, the man acquiesced to their leaving with a curt nod and stepped back.

Petri grasped Harry's left hand tightly and turned on his heel. They apparated to the designated point in Diagon Alley, then immediately disapparated again, appearing at the foot of the coffin house. Harry shut his eyes and held his breath, trying not to vomit. The fact that there was nothing in his stomach helped. He wasn't hungry despite not having eaten for what must have been days, so had to assume that they had given him potions for that at St Mungo's.

"Explain," Petri said as soon as they reached the bottom of the stairs, pulling up a chair and holding his head tiredly in one hand.

Harry had no idea where to start, so he tried to keep it simple, "That auror was Yaxley, Annette's dad. He's a Death Eater. He made me take a portkey to the Dark Lord, who gave me this." He held up his silver hand.

"A thief's curse," Petri muttered, kneading his forehead. "I've never seen one in real life, but it looks exactly like the description."

"You knew about this? That it was possible to fix my hand?" Harry asked accusingly. Petri made a high, distressed sound in the back of his throat.

"You call this a fix?" he asked. "Do you really believe whatever lies the Dark Lord tried to placate you with?"

Harry frowned and tried to recall what these placating lies might have been, finding it remarkably difficult to remember for something that had happened only hours ago. In his defence, he had been under the influence of a calming draught and hadn't been paying as much attention as he should have. "I think he did tell me that it was a curse. So what exactly does it do?" he asked, feeling a curl of dread in his stomach.

The lines in Petri's face deepened. "I am almost certain that that hand is the thief's curse, so named because it was once used to bind thieves who had had their wand hand cut off as punishment. It prevents you from using the hand to commit a disloyal act against the caster. Though it is able to channel your magic using the caster's will, this means the caster can suppress that ability at any time, to any degree. Do you understand? The Dark Lord owns your right hand."

'Well, bugger,' was all Harry could think.

"And there's no way to remove it, I suppose?" Harry asked. He couldn't believe he was thinking about cutting off more of his arm after he had just got his hand back, but extenuating circumstances had somehow obtained. Hysterical incredulity bubbled inside his chest, threatening to spill into inappropriate laughter.

"I don't recall the exact details, but I believe that if you attempt to get rid of it, the curse will execute you for treason first," Petri said with a sardonic quirk of his lip. "Be glad that you have somehow gained the Dark Lord's favour. If he wishes to control rather than kill you, then he clearly does not consider you to be an enemy, though I have no idea what could have caused this sudden change of heart."

"Maybe he realised that I'm just a kid, and couldn't possibly pose a threat to him?" Harry suggested.

Petri stared at him.

"That was kind of a joke," Harry said. "You're supposed to laugh."

A soft snort did escape Petri at that. "Quite. That he deemed it prudent to place such a curse on you suggests the opposite. He might have ignored you entirely otherwise. He is wary of you, but you are somehow useful to him. Frankly, neither of those things make any sense. Anybody else would have been dead three times over."

Harry sighed, flexing his silver digits. "On the bright side, at least the hand works. As long as I'm not disloyal or whatever. What does that even mean?"

"Whatever the Dark Lord wishes it to mean," Petri said. Harry grimaced. Lovely. "You should learn to cast with your left hand, so that you aren't helpless when the Dark Lord deems you unworthy to cast with your right."

Harry took out his wand with his left hand. His grip felt awkward, clunky.

"No," Petri said. "You'll need a new wand."

"What?" said Harry, flummoxed.

Petri made an impatient noise. "You want to be able to cast with both hands, do you not?"

"At once?" Harry asked.

Petri rolled his eyes. "Not at once, foolish boy, at all. If you learn to use your wand to cast left-handed, then it will no longer work well for your right hand, so you will need another."

"Wait, really?" Harry demanded. "How come?"

"Wands are enchanted to adapt quickly to the user, but the downside to that enchantment is that you cannot expect them to remember how to cast the same spell two different ways," Petri explained. "I suppose that theoretically, it should be possible to make a wand that allows multiple variations, but I am not nearly well-versed enough in wand-crafting to know how to begin. I only know that it's not standard."

"Is that why it's hard to cast magic with someone else's wand?" Harry asked.

Petri nodded. "Partially. The materials may also not be compatible with your natural style."

Harry frowned. "Style? What does that mean?"

"People do not all cast magic in the same way, even for the same spells," Petri said. He rubbed at his chin, brow furrowed in thought. "Some lean more on their emotions, for example, while others rely on having a very precise picture of what they wish to achieve, and that changes the—I don't have a good word for this, but let's say, consistency—the consistency of the magic. Different materials channel different consistencies more or less efficiently. It's also why we say some woods are good for charms or transfiguration, or why some cores are considered more powerful or more precise. That said, a properly educated wizard should be able achieve basic results with any wand."

Harry was apparently not yet a properly educated wizard, for he could not get a satisfactory response from either of Petri's spare wands—wands which he now realised used to belong to his other two predecessors, Ulrich and Aleksandra.

"If you cannot produce sparks effortlessly, then the wand is not a good match. I suppose there was a reason why I gave you Horst's wand in the first place," Petri muttered.

"Can I get my own wand, then? New?" Harry tried, and when Petri still looked reluctant, added, "I'll pay for it. I have the galleons."

Dilemma apparently resolved, Petri's face smoothed out and he nodded. "We'll go to Diagon Alley first thing in the evening. But first, let's see if you can get any of these to respond. I'm curious."

He gestured to the counter at the back of the room, where his experimental wands were piled into a corner. Harry dutifully waved each of them and discovered that unicorn hairs hated him.

Petri sighed. "Well, at least we can save some time at the wandmaker's."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: traumatic injury, amputation (non-graphic), suicidal ideation


	54. Cuddywifter

They did not save any time at Ollivander's. There had been a dozen wands that had made sparks for Harry and seemed exactly as functional as his willow wand, but none of these had satisfied the wandmaker. Harry must have spent thirty minutes in the shop, ever-cognisant of Petri's increasingly impatient stare burning into his back, waving wands until his arm and brain went numb. He was shaken out of his tired stupor very soundly, however, by the old man's closing remark.

"Do you think it's just a coincidence?" Harry blurted out as soon as they were back in the loud, bustling atmosphere of Diagon Alley. "That my wand has the same core as the Dark Lord's?"

Petri, who was walking slightly behind him, grunted in the back of his throat. "It most likely has something to do with that hand. It's his, after all."

Harry grimaced. Ollivander had insisted that he try wands with his right hand, despite Harry's protests that he was planning on using his left to cast.

"Your wand hand is more than just the hand that holds your wand," the batty old man had whispered nonsensically, pressing wand after wand into his silver hand before snatching them away just as quickly. At the time, the reason for these rejections had eluded him, but he could not deny now that there was something about his new holly and phoenix feather wand that felt right in a way that Horst's wand never had. The wood was pleasantly warm to the touch, perhaps because of the phoenix feather encased within, and just holding it made him feel empowered and confident, which sounded daft out loud but was simply true.

When he moved it to his left hand, that feeling suddenly vanished, leaving him breathlessly bereft.

"Can I use this one with my right hand, and my old one with my left? It feels better that way," Harry asked as they returned to the coffin house, half expecting Petri to scold him for being delusional.

But Petri shrugged. "As long as you do not interchange them, it should hardly matter which wand you use with which hand in the end. Your new wand will learn quickly enough. It is left-handed casting in general that you may have difficulty with. Your magical flow is likely weaker on your left side and you won't be developing the dexterity for proper wandwork overnight."

Harry winced at the thought, remembering how long it had taken him to master waving his wand in a decent circle, even with his dominant hand.

"So do I swish in the same or opposite direction?" Harry asked, taking out his willow wand.

"What do you think? The standard wand movement does not change just because you're using a different hand," Petri told him.

Harry frowned. "Why can't I use the same wand for both hands, if it's the same?"

Petri rolled his eyes. "Think for a moment, boy! Unless you believe you can achieve exactly the same motion with both hands, the same movement will not actually be the _same movement._ Your two hands may not even have compatible styles."

Harry looked pensively down to the wand in his right hand. He really had put it there because it had felt off in his left, had he not? Perhaps Petri had a point.

Harry was a little bit excited to cast with his left hand, imagining what it would be like if he could wield two wands at once in a duel. It was ridiculous—he'd probably get tongue tied trying to alternate hands while he had only one mouth to say incantations with, but the idea still brought a grin to his face.

He took a piece of parchment and sketched the simple slash of the severing charm. " _Diffindo!_ "

A small perforation opened up in the centre, but the parchment did not tear in two as he had envisioned. Harry sighed. This was going to take a while.

A cascade of colourful packages landed on top of his practise parchment. Harry blinked at them. "Are these—"

"The rest of your Christmas presents," Petri said. "Open them and put them away before you practise. They've been taking up space for days."

Harry felt a lump suddenly come into his throat. Petri eyed him knowingly.

"They're not cursed. I've checked."

"How would I check though, in the future? Spell-revealing doesn't work on strong curses right? And what about structure sight? How can I tell whether something's a curse?" Harry blurted. Petri blinked.

"You've learned structure sight at school, then?" he asked, and Harry realised that this was the first time he had ever mentioned it to Petri. He wanted to smack himself in the face for not asking his literal enchanting master to help him with the charm before.

"Yeah," he mumbled.

"Show me," said Petri. Harry glanced doubtfully down at his silver limb, then at his willow wand in his flesh hand. With an impatient noise, Petri said, "Try a few basic spells then. Get used to your new wand."

Harry took out the holly wand and levitated one of his presents. Fortunately, the new wand was exactly the same length as his old one, so it wasn't at all awkward in his hand. Though the spell was a little wobbly at first, after just two tries it grew perfectly steady. The severing charm worked to cut a ribbon, and now Harry really wanted to know what was in the package, even as his hand prickled with phantom pain.

Petri gave an approving nod. "It shouldn't take long to adapt to common spells as long as your wand movement is reasonably standard. Try the structure sight now."

Harry tried the spell on himself first to remind himself of how it was supposed to go. The whole room dissolved into a soup of reds, yellows, and blues—right, his glasses were also enchanted. He cancelled the spell and pointed his wand at Petri, who indicated for him to proceed.

" _Structuram vedo_ ," he cast.

Harry winced as Petri made a funny sound in the back of his throat. "Didn't they teach you spatial remapping?"

"No?" Harry said, flummoxed. He couldn't remember reading about anything like that in the basic _Compendium_ entry. Petri sighed and cancelled the spell, before sketching the complex wand movement at Harry.

Immediately, Harry's vision was filled with a network of orbs that pulsed in a rainbow of colours. When he turned his head, the colours and configuration changed fluidly, some orbs brightening or winking out, some connections flaring to life and others sizzling away.

"I find this format much preferable to the natural mapping," Petri said. "Trying to let shape and size represent both physical properties and magical properties simultaneously is extremely messy and confusing. Here the intensity represents distance from you, which is the only relevant physical measure. The hue reveals the effect of the magic, and the size its current level of activity. You will also see connectors showing which effects are enchanted together and which are independent charms. Take off your spectacles and look at your thief's hand. If you see anything like that, it's probably cursed."

Harry pulled off his glasses and held up his hand. He was immediately greeted by a bright indigo constellation which settled into neat spiral, out of the centre of which sprouted intertwined red and blue strands that ended in tiny but brilliant bursts of orange, like a firework. It was strangely pretty.

"When there are both blue and red connections between two points, that's usually an activation condition. You see the yellow on the other end?"

Harry nodded, causing the image to wobble bewilderingly. He pressed his hand up to his face to steady it.

"It may be difficult to distinguish, but if you look closely there is a separate red configuration caged inside the yellow. What shape do you see?"

"Sort of a figure eight," Harry said, squinting reflexively, as if that would help him focus better.

"The hallmark of a physical compulsion. The more you attempt to fight it, the stronger it becomes. At a guess, it will force your hand to turn against you under some condition. You also see that everything cascades into a single, central point?" Petri asked.

"Yeah."

"A preferred curse structure. It's relatively easy to modify or even undo the peripheral effects, but in order to break the core spell, you need to remove every other layer one at a time. Because of the depth, it is resistant to _finite,_ and the most dangerous aspects of the curse will activate long before you can begin to counter them," Petri explained.

Harry tried to apply these learnings to his presents, but most of them turned out to be non-magical. The only spells he saw were tiny and simple, with none of the edges and layers featured in his silver hand.

"They're probably spelled sweets," Petri told him.

Indeed, Harry opened up the packages to find chocolate frogs and fizzing whizbees from his roommates. He set them aside for later. A slightly more magical package had come from Neville.

It was a fancy pounce pot with silver filigree vines. The note said that it was spelled to distribute just the right amount to size any paper to standard. There was also a second note, or rather, letter, from Neville:

_Dear Harry,_

_I hope you're all right now. I read about what happened in the paper, but I'm sure it isn't the whole story. Gran says it's indecent that they printed anything about it all. You don't have to tell me anything if you don't want to. I just wanted to check if you're okay, and send you some rue. It's supposed to increase your sensitivity to danger if you keep a bit of leaf in your mouth (I know it sounds inconvenient, but you can use a sticking charm to keep it under your tongue). It's not much, and you don't have to use it if you don't want to, but maybe it'll help._

_Neville_

Harry flipped over the letter and spotted a folded up bit of newsprint spellotaped to the back. Peeling it back revealed a handful of greyish leaves. A pungent odour immediately rushed into his nostrils, and he reeled.

"What is it?" Petri asked. He narrowed his eyes and gave a sniff. "What's next—poison?"

"I hope not," Harry muttered weakly, but Petri had a point. His first instinct was to think that of course Neville would never try to kill him, but he had thought the same exact thing about Vince. Granted, Vince had always been flaky where Neville was reliable, but they had been friends all the same.

Harry still felt terrible for running to his trunk for _Ingrid's Ingredient Index_ and _One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi,_ heart thudding in his ears. He felt himself flush all the way up to his ears when the books told him, in more academic terms, exactly what Neville had written. Biting his lip, Harry compared the leaf to the sketch in his text, before finally snipping off a leaflet and sticking it under his tongue.

His mouth immediately went dry at the awful bitterness, and he had to swallow several times in rapid succession and hold his breath to avoid spitting it out. He distracted himself by returning to his presents, setting Neville's letter aside to reply to later.

The final package was a square one from Luna Lovegood. He blinked, not having expected anything from her and not having got her anything himself. He peeled back the radish-patterned wrapping paper, unsurprised to see that it was a book.

"The Tales of Beedle the Bard," he read. The cover was illustrated—as he watched, a white rabbit hopped across the page, disappearing behind a large stump. The image melted slowly into that of an elaborate fountain. Harry's gaze flickered up to where a knotted cord poked over the spine.

He tilted the book up and it fell open to the marked page. The left side was printed in runes, but fortunately the right was in modern English. "The Tale of the Three Brothers," it read, and Harry recalled now the story that Luna had started telling him when he had shown her his invisibility cloak. Below the title, somebody had drawn a strange symbol—a circle inscribed in a triangle, bisected by a vertical line.

Noticing that the bookmark wasn't a bookmark at all, but a wooden pendant with the same symbol inscribed into it, Harry picked it up, bemused.

"Who sent you that?" Petri demanded with sudden vigour. Harry dropped the pendant in surprise, and Petri summoned it and held it up to the nearest bluebell flame. "Das Wappen des Blutes," he murmured.

The crest of blood?

"What does it mean?" Harry asked. Petri didn't seem alarmed, but rather, astonished.

"It's Gellert's—Grindelwald's signature. You've learned of him at school, have you not?" Petri said, and Harry nodded, even though Binns was useless and the only substantial information he knew had actually come from Lord Voldemort. Petri continued, "Those of us who made blood oaths to him received pendants like this one. Not exactly like this, but this is certainly the same symbol. Who sent this to you?"

"Luna Lovegood," Harry said. "She's a first year. It's in this book, too."

Harry showed Petri the book, and he furrowed his brow as he took it, thumbing through the pages.

"It's a children's book," he said finally. "Perhaps it's only a coincidence?"

He did not sound like he quite believed it himself. Harry finally spotted a folded note lying in the remains of the packaging. He snatched it up.

_Happy Christmas Harry!_

_Here's the book with the 'Tale of the Three Brothers' in it. I never did get around to telling you the whole story. You should read the other stories too, if you haven't heard of them already. Let me know if you think your cloak could be Death's cloak! Wouldn't that be nifty? You can join the Seekers of the Deathly Hallows, and you'll even be ahead by one Hallow. If you wear that pendant, it'll let others know that you're a believer._

_Luna_

Even more confused, Harry held the note out to Petri. "Luna's sort of… strange. I think her father runs a periodical full of conspiracy theories. Maybe it really is just a coincidence."

But Petri wasn't listening to him—he seemed to be reading the book in detail. A deep frown had crept onto his face.

"The wand," he muttered under his breath, blinking rapidly. "Could it be? But no. If he could not have failed to win the duel, then…"

Harry had to bite deeply into his lip to keep from demanding what Petri was talking about. That was a sure-fire way to get hexed.

"Read this story," Petri told him after a minute, passing the book back, still opened to 'The Tale of the Three Brothers'.

Harry remembered the first part. It was just as Luna had told it—three brothers, accomplished wizards, conjured a bridge to cross an otherwise impassable river, where Death, enraged at their survival and full of trickery, gave them each a reward of their choosing. Then came the moral of the story, the part Luna had left out. The two older brothers, who had arrogantly thought to cheat Death, quickly lost their lives, while the youngest evaded him for a long while. But in the end, he, too, died.

"And then he greeted Death as an old friend, and went with him gladly, and, equals, they departed this life," Harry read aloud, his breath quickening suddenly as he drew an unwelcome parallel with Lord Voldemort's offer.

' _When the time comes that you tire of this life, then you will seek me out, and I shall kill you.'_

Heedless of this dark thought, Petri said, eyes shining, "I understand exactly why somebody would believe that the objects in this fairy tale are real. Do you see it?"

Harry frowned. The objects seemed mythical enough to him, even with his limited understanding of what could and couldn't be done with magic. A wand that could win any duel? Fanciful. Bringing back the dead? True resurrection was beyond what anybody had ever accomplished. And the cloak… well, Harry wasn't sure the cloak in the story actually did anything.

"No," he finally admitted, after along pause. "Could I have a hint?"

"Does the stone remind you of something?" Petri asked.

"Well, a resurrection stone, like it says," Harry said immediately. He'd had that thought the first time Luna had told him the story. "But a resurrection stone doesn't actually 'recall the dead' that way."

"Of course not," said Petri, rolling his eyes. "But it could appear to. A skilled conjurer with a well-made resurrection stone might seem to have spirits at his beck and call."

"But what about the wand? How can a wand make you win a duel when you still have to cast all the spells? Even if the brother in the story was a real person, isn't it more likely that he was just lying about it?" Harry protested.

"Necromancy," said Petri.

"What?" Harry blurted, thrown. Petri did not like to use this word, out of what Harry had gathered was pedantic insistence that it referred only to a small part of the 'other arts', a part that emphatically did not include creating inferi and conjuring spirits, so he had no idea how it could relate to winning duels.

"Changing fate. If you walk into a duel where your opponent is fated to die, then you will be the winner, yes?" Petri said. Harry's jaw dropped. His mind raced.

"Could that work on my fate?" he couldn't help asking.

"It's magic, not a miracle," Petri told him with a flat look. "You remember how onerous it is to change someone's fate, do you not? Recall also that it is even more difficult on a living target, and only temporary. You might increase your odds, but I should think even a tenfold increase will do you no good against the Dark Lord."

Harry flushed. Petri was probably right. Ten times zero was still zero.

"What if I had that wand?" Harry asked, unable to escape the frantic current of his wishful thinking. Petri snorted.

"If that wand is real, then its master is Albus Dumbledore," he said.

Harry was gaping again, completely astonished by this crash landing of fiction into reality. "Because he's never lost a duel?" he asked, speculating wildly.

"Because he won it from Gellert Grindelwald," Petri corrected.

"In a duel?" Harry checked, and Petri nodded. "But that's not even possible, right? If Grindelwald had an unbeatable wand, wouldn't he have won?"

A pensive look came over Petri's face. "If the wand exists and works through manipulating fate—and I can think of no other way for it to work—then it is only unbeatable if you are duelling to kill. And Gellert… Gellert never duelled to kill. He preferred words, or failing that, to lay traps and hazards for his enemies to end themselves."

Harry's eyes widened as something Dumbledore had said suddenly came to mind. He had claimed with confidence that he could beat Lord Voldemort in a duel, but only if he were aiming to kill. And then, in the same breath, he had told Harry that he never would, that he could under no circumstances take a life.

"What's the point of having a theoretically unbeatable wand if you never actually use it?" Harry mumbled, flummoxed. If the wand really was real, it seemed like Dumbledore wasn't even the first to avoid exercising its power, so it couldn't be a matter of ethics.

"I don't know," Petri said. "Perhaps this is all nothing more than a foolish flight of fancy. Gellert might have simply taken a liking to this fairy tale, or even invented his signature independently. Still, I am curious. Your invisibility cloak once belonged to your father, yes? So it must be at least thirteen years old, likely older. I would expect some signs of wear or fading at this point. Could I take a look at it?"

Harry was leery of experimenting on his cloak, but he had to admit that he, too, was curious. So he ran into the bedroom and back, cloak draped over his arm.

"Put it on and move around a bit," said Petri, and peered carefully at Harry once he did. "I don't see anything, not even a shimmer."

"What about structure sight?" Harry asked.

"Structure sight is fooled by spells that interfere with your ordinary sight, but if you take it off first, it should be visible," Petri said. Harry removed the cloak, only for Petri to make a soft sound of surprise as he cast the charm on himself. "I stand corrected. I see nothing."

"What does that mean?" Harry demanded, a little excited despite himself.

Petri cancelled his spell. "Normally I would say it means it's made from natural materials, like demiguise hair, rather than imbued with disillusionment or bedazzlement, but I've never heard of demiguise fabric remaining invisible for longer than a few years without some sort of enchantment to preserve it. Additionally, if you simply examine the material," he said, picking up a corner of the cloak and pulling taut in the light, "you can see that the fibres are extremely fine, closer to silk than animal hair."

Harry, knowing nothing about textiles, took his word for it. "You don't think it's really Death's cloak?" he joked.

Worryingly, Petri did not respond for a long, considering moment. "If it is, then it should hide you from Death's sight. Put it on again."

"You're not going to try to kill me, are you?" Harry asked, edging away a little. To his relief, Petri scoffed.

"Of course not—that's not what that means at all. Haven't you been paying attention? Death's sight clearly refers to necromancy."

"Oh." Mollified, Harry draped the cloak over himself and pulled up the hood. Petri reached into his sleeve pocket, pulling out a vial of what was probably blood. Harry eyed it suspiciously. "Is that my blood?"

"Of course," said Petri, like he didn't see what was wrong with this picture.

"When did you get that?" Harry demanded.

Petri glanced in his general direction with incredulity. "We sleep in the same room."

Harry's jaw dropped, but no sounds came out. Did Petri seriously draw his blood at will while he was asleep? He made a face.

An oblivious Petri next extracted a leather-bound book from his sleeve and summoned a quill, which he caught deftly between two fingers. Putting his wand away, he sat down, opened the book to a seemingly random page, and dipped the quill into Harry's blood. Then he positioned his hand over the parchment, as if preparing to write, but did not actually do so for a long time. Instead, he stared sullenly into the distance before springing into a sudden frenzy, tearing across the page and pausing only to load the quill with more blood. As suddenly as it had started, it ended; Petri sat back with a gasp, as if waking from a dream.

"What was that?" Harry blurted when it seemed that he was finished.

In lieu of answering, Petri read what he had written aloud: "Es dämmert um Mitternacht. Der falsche Freund sät den Verrat. Sein Garten wächst wie des Dunklen Lords Macht. Er erntet zu spät, hat alles schon gesagt—"

Petri slammed the book shut abruptly, a deep frown etched onto his face. Harry tried furiously to grasp the strange poem—there was something about sowing betrayal and the Dark Lord's power, and somebody had said something too late?

At this point, he noticed that the book resting under Petri's tense palm looked rather familiar.

"That's—that's not the cursed book is it? The one I told you about?" Harry choked out, his voice unexpectedly high.

"I volunteered to examine it for Dumbledore," Petri said, his shoulders slowly descending to a more relaxed position.

Harry didn't think his jaw could open any further without unhinging itself. "And he let you?"

"I'm to understand that he appreciates my help and my expertise in the dark arts, as he is very busy these days," said Petri levelly, though Harry detected a sardonic glint in his eye.

"With what?" Harry demanded.

"With running his little vigilante group for fighting the Dark Lord," Petri said. Harry blinked at this, suddenly understanding better what Lupin had said about 'people who oppose Lord Voldemort'.

Not to be so easily distracted, he said, "You're not going to die from that book too, are you?" It would serve him right, but unfortunately, Petri probably knew what he was doing.

"Everybody dies," he said. "This book simply helps you discover how. I'm extremely impressed with it so far. It turns one of the least useful forms of necromancy into something almost viable."

"And what's that?" Harry asked, scowling at the way Petri always managed to reveal just enough information to bait him into asking for a lesson.

"Psychography, or spirit writing. It's done while you're awake, with no material connection to the dead required, so you can see already that it should yield only mediocre results. You hold a quill and pray that the dead write you a meaningful message," Petri said, disdain dripping from his voice. "I haven't wasted your time with it so far, but perhaps you can try it with this book."

"No way!" Harry cried immediately, stepping back as if the book might leap up to attack him. "In case you forgot, that book killed someone at school."

"He killed himself," Petri corrected. "This book contributed to his motivation as much as any words might have. It isn't cursed, and I would scarcely consider it a dark artefact."

"I don't understand," Harry muttered. "How could you possibly read something in a book that makes you want to kill yourself? And what about Penelope—that other girl who had it, and got depressed?"

Petri hummed. "I don't know for certain, but I imagine that some people might find it unpleasant to learn that they are fated to die in the near future. They might wonder what point there is in accomplishing anything now, if it will never lead to anything greater. Then, they discover the fates of those around them. Perhaps their loved ones will die young, and they can't face them with that knowledge, carry the secret inside themselves without going mad. The dead do not impart random information. They reveal that which is most likely to drive you to join them. It is simply the price of necromancy."

Harry frowned. "So Penelope found out how she was going to die, too? Is that really that bad? I know I'm going to die at the Dark Lord's hand and… all right, so it's pretty bad, but I'm not just lying around moping about it." He glanced to the book again and it suddenly occurred to him that it wasn't just a piece of reusable parchment, but an actual book, with many pages. "Is everything that anybody's ever written in there still in there?"

"Yes," Petri said.

"Can I read it?" Harry asked.

"You can, but you won't understand it," Petri warned him. "Most of what's in there would have been incomprehensible rubbish even to the diviner, let alone someone without any of the relevant context. You'll most likely also be compelled to write in it."

"What?" Harry demanded. "How is that not dark magic?"

Petri rolled his eyes. "It's not intended to harm the user. It's simply a feature to induce effective psychography. I'd like to replicate it, in fact, or perhaps Dumbledore will allow me to keep the book. Anyway, remove your cloak. We aren't finished."

Harry, who had forgotten that he was still invisible, sheepishly shrugged the cloak off his shoulders.

"Stand there, and I'll try again," Petri said, taking position with the quill and blood once more. Harry crept closer this time so he could read over Petri's shoulder as the words spilled out. They were in English this time.

_Child of summer, end at winter's hand. Beware the word that is not a command. Wands will cross that should never be crossed. A soul will be found that should never have been lost. Winter's child, by summer's demand, tips the hourglass, spills the sand._

They made no sense, and yet, these words struck a chord of deep foreboding inside Harry's chest. Petri jerked back to awareness a moment later, dropping the quill and studying the poem.

"It's not proof," he murmured, glancing at the discarded pile of silky cloth by Harry's feet, "but it is evidence. While you were under the cloak, writing with your blood still resulted in my fate. But now that you are visible, your blood reveals your fate, as one should expect."

"But what does it mean?" Harry asked. "What's the 'word that is not a command'?"

"A prophecy," Petri answered without even thinking. "Perhaps the hypothetical one that drove the Dark Lord to attempt to kill you. You remember?"

How could he not? Harry grimaced and nodded. Petri was lucky not to know how not-hypothetical it was.

"This is largely worthless," Petri said, gesturing to the words. "It will likely only make sense after the fact. One tenet of responsible grammatica is to know when not to attempt an interpretation at all." He shut the book with a decisive snap.

"So you were saying that my cloak stopped you from telling my future?" Harry asked, picking up the garment in question and folding it up properly.

"So it seems," Petri confirmed. "We might do other tests later, though most other forms of necromancy are significantly more onerous."

"Is that actually useful for anything, though?" Harry wondered. "I mean, I can't hide under it all the time, or even most of the time, so it wouldn't stop anybody for long, if they wanted to change my fate or something."

Petri looked pensive. "I'm not sure. It's possible that it does more than negate necromancy. It might actually shield you from fate."

"You mean, as long as I'm under it, I can't die?" Harry asked.

Petri shrugged. "You could still die, but the cause could no longer be predetermined. It isn't something that can be tested," he pointed out. "I wouldn't count on that theory."

It was too late. Harry's imagination was already running away from him. It all fit with the story. The third brother had taken off the cloak when he was ready to die, and not before. If hiding under the cloak actually made him no longer destined to be killed by the Dark Lord, Harry would happily revise his opinion about how impossible it was to stay under it indefinitely.

A tapping from above interrupted his fantasies—an owl.

"It'll be Vlaicu again," Petri said as he summoned the letter to him, before even looking at it.

"Again?" Harry asked.

"He's been bombarding me with demands to see you," Petri explained. Harry didn't need to ask to know that the man hadn't bothered replying.

"At least let him know I'm okay," Harry said, but Petri only snorted.

"Your tragic circumstances and miraculous survival are all over the paper. He can read the news like everybody else. Despite what he thinks, he has no claim over you."

Petri had equally little claim over him, Harry thought, if they were going to discount magical connections. With a huff, he snatched up the fallen letter and tore it open, blinking in surprise at its contents.

"It's an invitation to a New Year's party," he said, "put on by the Coffin House for all the tenants."

"So now he's employing oblique methods," Petri said, rolling his eyes.

"Hey, it's a real party, and we do live here," Harry pointed out. "Did this happen last year?"

Petri gave a curt nod. "I had no desire to rub elbows with beasts."

Harry realised that he was talking about all their vampire neighbours. He glanced to the invitation again, noting the handwritten scrawl at the bottom. "There's a message from Shy, too."

"Who?" said Petri

"Shyverwretch, the poison shop lady. Our neighbour," Harry clarified. "We're friends." He wasn't sure that was completely true, but it was satisfying to see Petri's face screw up in disdain. Shy had written that he absolutely had to come to the party, because the other Harry would be there. It took a moment for Harry to remember that the other Harry was a giant snake.

"You'll be attending, then?" Petri asked.

Harry blinked at him. "I can go?"

"I see no reason to prohibit it," Petri said, a long-suffering look on his face. "The Dark Lord has taken you once, and you aren't dead. What more do you have to fear? Perhaps you should, as they say, 'live a little.' Before you really die."

Harry regarded him with suspicion, but his desire to attend the party won out, so he nodded.


	55. Primary

The New Year's party started early, at nine in the evening, and was literally right outside on the south side of the graveyard. Harry had never had occasion to walk that way—there was nothing past the coffin houses but an overgrown triangular stretch of grass. Tonight, a huge tent had been put up in its centre, and underneath the canopy, long tables covered with funeral shrouds groaned under the weight of a generous selection of refreshments. A string quartet on a raised platform under the tent warmed the atmosphere with an upbeat rondo.

Harry had barely made it out of the rows of coffin houses before he was accosted by a grey blur. Despite his great speed, Silviu's hands came gently down on his shoulders and his eyes glimmered with concern. Harry felt his chest tighten, then relax.

"Harry. You're all right?" Silviu took a long look at him, his relief palpable.

"I'm fine," Harry said. His eyes traced over Silviu's features carefully, as if expecting to see some trace of his fate written there. The vampire looked middle-aged today. Fine wrinkles collected at the corners of his mouth when he smiled. His eyes remained gloomy, almost haunted.

"Can you forgive me?" Silviu asked, and Harry blinked at him. He immediately clarified, "For allying with the Dark Lord. I swore I'd keep you safe, and then I went ahead and did the opposite. I don't know what I was thinking—it's like it completely slipped my mind that he'd want you dead."

"It's okay," Harry said, his own guilt deepening with every word. It wasn't Silviu who needed to be apologising this time. The vampire was the one who had been hurt on the Dark Lord's behalf, though he did not know it.

"I'll break it off," Silviu declared. Harry's hands shot up to grip his wrists.

"No, you can't, are you mad?" he hissed, appalled. "He'll kill you all. You have a whole company to think of. And he'd still want to kill me and you wouldn't be able to stop him."

Bile rose in his throat as only that last reason seemed to drive the reckless glint from Silviu's eye.

The vampire coughed, pulling back, and Harry let him go. "You're right. I don't know what I was thinking there." He ran a clawed hand through his hair. "My emotions got the better of me, I suppose. Look at me, ruining a happy occasion with such serious talk. I apologise. I'm sure you'd rather be enjoying the celebration. I'm glad you came tonight."

He took his leave before Harry could respond, hurrying off to greet other newly arrived guests. A little shaken by the conversation, especially Silviu's momentary lapse in judgment, Harry continued to the refreshment table and poured some ice water from a pitcher into a fancy crystal goblet. It was unpleasantly cold, but it helped to clear his head.

He looked around, noting with unease that there were more people than he'd realised before, several dozen at least, and that he didn't recognise anybody in his immediate vicinity. He didn't know how he was meant to find Shy in the muddle of adults—she was even shorter than him. Perhaps he should have stayed home after all. His stomach sloshed uncomfortably, filled with only water, and he decided he would leave after getting something to eat and perhaps take a walk around the graveyard.

Though the tables seemed to be laden with drinks of all kinds, he found only a tiny, neglected square in the corner offering solid food, and only an uninspiring spread of tinned biscuits at that. He reached for one, but before he could close his fingers around it somebody shoved the whole tray aside and dropped a cauldron onto the table with a thunk. Harry gaped at the culprit—a portly man who stood at eye level and turned to peer at him cheerfully through a thick-rimmed pince-nez.

"My apologies, my dear boy, I didn't see you there. It's frightfully dark," he said, adjusting his glasses.

Harry glanced around and realised that the man was right. The waxing moon was hidden behind a murky bank of clouds, leaving only a meagre collection of stars and some weakly glimmering fairies for illumination. Somehow, Harry had no trouble seeing at all, though the night vision on his spectacles remained disengaged.

"Right, it's no problem," he murmured. Unable to help himself, he craned his neck to get a glimpse of what was in the cauldron.

"Boiled sweets!" said the man, gesturing expansively. "Home made. They're a must-try. Oh, well, for vampires, anyway. They're blood-flavoured. Sorry. I suppose they don't have much in the way of human food at these things."

Harry squinted at the man, thinking he'd never seen a fat vampire before. Then he remembered that the man had said it was dark, so he probably wasn't a vampire after all.

"Aren't you human too?" he asked, hoping it wasn't a rude question.

"Oh, yes, right in one," said the man, smiling with blunt teeth. He stuck out a hand. "Eldred Worple, at your service."

Harry recognised the name. "You're the author of _Blood Brothers,_ " he said, taking the hand gingerly in his silver one.

Worple let out a startled noise, perhaps at the unexpected chill. "Oh, you've heard of me, then? Yes, that I am. And you would be?"

"Harry Potter," said Harry, thinking it unlikely that he could have prevaricated for long anyway.

"Harry Potter?" Worple exclaimed, surprise flashing across his face. He leaned closer, as if for a better look. " _The_ Harry Potter? Well, of course you are. Harry Potter, I am simply delighted! And shocked! What brings you here, of all places, tonight?"

"Well you see, I got this invitation," Harry began, but soon realised that his attempted sarcasm was sliding right off, as Worple stared eagerly at him. "I live here. We're neighbours. You're the one with the venomous tentacula, right? At B Thirteen?"

Worple beamed, his mouth forming into a surprised O. "Oh, yes, that's exactly correct. Neighbours, really, and I had no idea! It seems you know much more about me than I know about you. A most curious state of affairs, when you are a national hero and I a mere biographer. You realise, that you, the boy behind the Boy-Who-Lived, are shrouded in mystery? The world heard about your safe arrival at Hogwarts and your sorting, of course, but for the very next piece of news after such a long silence to be such a horrible circumstance—you're recovering all right from the accident, I hope?"

Harry, a little dumbfounded, just nodded. He hadn't been aware that his sorting last year had made the papers. That seemed mad. And 'national hero' was blowing his fame a little out of proportion.

"Have you any plans to have your biography written?" Worple continued.

"I haven't lived that long, yet," Harry managed incredulously. "What would there be to write about?"

Worple ducked his head a little sheepishly. "Well, in a few years, perhaps. You'll keep me in mind, won't you? I would be delighted to write it. I'm sure you'll go on to do great things."

Harry nodded absently, his gaze flickering to the side as a towering shadow rose up next to Worple.

" _Zuccherino_ , are you talking to the refreshments again?"

The shadow resolved into a tall vampire who spoke in a low, exasperated voice. Harry noted with a thrill of awe that his beaky nose was even bigger than Snape's.

Worple jumped a foot into the air. "Oh, Sanguini, I didn't see you there. No, he's not food, this is Harry Potter. Our neighbour. Harry Potter!" he repeated, as if he still couldn't believe it.

The vampire fixed burning red eyes on Harry for a tense moment. Then his gaze cooled to a green like old copper, his lips quirked into a small smile, and he held out his hand at chest level. Harry, vaguely remembering this hand shake from when he had first met Shy, reached up from below and clasped Sanguini's large, clawed hand.

"Giuseppe Coppola, but everybody calls me Sanguini. It's nice to meet you, Harry Potter."

"You can just call me Harry," said Harry quickly. "Nice to meet you too."

"Very good, Harry. You are one of Chariman Vlaicu's?" Sanguini asked.

Harry nodded.

"Such eclectic company he keeps," Sanguini said, chuckling. "I am always surprised to see what the youth are coming up with these days."

Harry wasn't sure how to respond to that, so he asked instead, "You're in a different company, then?"

"I prefer to wander alone," Sanguini said. He slung an arm around Worple's shoulder and pulled him close. "Aside from a dedicated human companion like my sweet treasure here."

"Sanguini!" Worple hissed, cheeks reddening, but the vampire only grinned and patted his curly hair like he was an errant child.

"But it's true, you are perfectly sweet inside and out." Still smiling, Sanguini reached a long arm into the cauldron that Worple had brought and plucked out a round, ruby red sweet, which he popped into his mouth.

Harry turned curiously to the cauldron. "Can I try one?"

"Of course. They're excellent," Sanguini assured him, even as Worple protested.

"They're blood-flavoured, like I said—"

But before he voice any more concerns, Harry had already helped himself. He had expected something like a blood pop, but couldn't hold back a sound of surprise as the first sticky, treacly layer melted on his tongue. He felt alert.

"Is it real blood?" he asked, and, seeing Worple's concerned expression, added, "It's really good."

Worple accepted this evaluation with a bemused smile. "Well, thank you. It isn't real blood, actually. I've spent years perfecting this formula to resemble it as best as possible, but it's made of one hundred percent plant material. Palatable potions are a hobby of mine."

"There he is, being all modest again," said Sanguini fondly. "Dear Eldred here has created friendlier versions of nearly all common household potions."

"That's an exaggeration, and anyway, they're much too convoluted. An apothecary looking to turn a profit would never accept recipes like mine. No, I'm happily a writer and not a potioneer for a reason," Worple maintained, though he glowed smugly.

"You mean, you've made things like Pepper-Up and blood-replenishing potion taste good?" Harry asked.

"That's right."

"What about nutritive potion?"

Worple shook his head. "I'm afraid I haven't worked on that one, my dear boy. It's already supposed to have a neutral enough taste, isn't it?"

Harry made a face. "I suppose you're right. It's just so bland, though, and sort of chalky."

"You've tried it before?" Worple asked, raising his eyebrows.

"I drink it all the time. It's a food substitute, right?" Harry asked. He narrowed his eyes, wondering if he was about to hear that Petri had been slowly poisoning him without his knowledge.

But Worple, though he looked concerned, nodded. "Well, yes, but it's supposed to be an emergency ration for hit-wizards on the go, not something for regular consumption. I'm sure it wouldn't be harmful, but it would be dreadfully boring, wouldn't it?"

"It really is," Harry agreed. "But it's cheap."

"My dear boy, a hearty stew is cheaper to brew than a cauldron of nutritive potion. Honestly, the recipe's not much different, but the former is far more satisfying," Worple told him, looking a little agitated.

"You're sure?" Harry demanded. He had to deliver this news to Petri immediately. An argument from money was sure to win him over. Though the food situation had improved drastically now that Petri allowed Rosenkol to experiment with cooking, the elf still only did it sporadically.

"Of course! Sanguini and I help organise the Purefair Alley Soup Kitchen, so I daresay we're intimately familiar with the ins and outs of feeding a crowd on a budget. We've got a place set for anybody who wants to eat there," Worple said, glancing at him meaningfully.

Flustered, Harry raised his hands. "It's not—I mean, I've got money of my own, I just…" He trailed off, unable to find the words to explain his situation.

"Anybody is welcome," Worple insisted. "Though if you've got money, we wouldn't say no a donation. Or if you'd like to volunteer, we'd appreciate that even more. I know you're busy at Hogwarts most of the year, my boy, but it would be valuable experience for you to come around during the summer. The Ministry of Magic loves to see applicants who do charitable work, you know! And there's really no better way to bolster your public image than to help those less fortunate than you."

Harry, a little bemused at Worple's direct appeal to his self-interest, nodded vaguely, unwilling to commit to anything but also unable to contain his curiosity. "Are there a lot of people who eat at the soup kitchen?"

Worple's excitable demeanour melted away. His eyes misted. "Oh yes, unfortunately. It's difficult for the wandless to find gainful employment, so they're often dependent on the goodwill of others. And the wandless population has grown explosively in the last decade. It's a problem, no doubt, but on the other hand I suspect it's because they're not dying as often of preventable causes."

"Sorry, by wandless, you mean squibs?" Harry asked. Worple certainly couldn't have been referring to creatures like vampires, who seem to do well enough for themselves.

"A common misconception," Worple said, sighing. "True squibs without an ounce of magical ability are few and far between. More common are people who never manage enough accidental magic to gain them admission to Hogwarts. Some of them buy their own wands and pass their OWLs anyway, but the majority can't afford the steep price or find self-study and correspondence courses too difficult. And no OWLs means no right to carry once they're of age."

"You mean, if I failed my OWLs, they'd take away my wand?" Harry demanded.

"Yes—anybody who can't make at least one OWL in a wand subject by the time they're seventeen will get a visit from the Improper Use of Magic Office to have their wand destroyed." Worple quickly held up a reassuring hand. "You have nothing to worry about, of course, my dear boy. You're a beloved public figure! Imagine the scandal. You're in Ravenclaw, anyway, and I've never heard of a Ravenclaw who didn't end up with a respectable handful of OWLs to their name. In fact, almost all Hogwarts students have no trouble meeting the minimum requirement."

Harry frowned. "I suppose I never realised that there were a lot of people—wizards, I mean—who didn't get into Hogwarts."

It was silly, because he personally knew an example, even. Annette was clearly capable of magic with a wand, but had not been accepted to Hogwarts as a child. Had she passed her OWLs, if she couldn't even read?

"Nobody likes to talk about it," Worple said, running a hand through his wispy hair. "And changing things is certainly out of the question. Hogwarts has always been very proud to have never mistakenly accepted a squib. No headmaster or board member would dare propose something that could tarnish its reputation."

"Aren't there other schools?" Harry asked. Worple shook his head.

"Not physical schools, not on this side of the channel, and certainly not for weak wizards. Can you imagine a qualified wizard willing to waste their time trying to teach people who can barely make sparks, without handsome compensation? I don't think equipping the wandless with wands is the proper way to go anyway. That won't really help them. What they need is a way to use the talents they do have to make a living." Worple coughed. "Excuse me, my dear boy. I didn't mean to get up on my soapbox like that. I hope I haven't bored you."

"Not at all, Mr Worple," Harry said quickly.

"Call me Eldred, please," said Worple. "We're neighbours, after all. You don't need to be shy about paying us a visit, either. We'd be delighted to have you over." He glanced at Sanguini, who nodded.

"Yes, simply delighted," the vampire echoed. "My sweet and I both work at home, so we are almost always there."

"What do you do for a living?" Harry asked Sanguini.

Sanguini smiled. "Me? I am an alchemist of sorts—a doll maker. I would be happy to show you my collection, if you are interested."

"Ew, no, don't fall for that," a familiar voice yelled. Shy elbowed her way into their circle, making a face at Sanguini before turning to Harry. "This guy's creepy dolls gave me nightmares for weeks. Trust me, Harry, you don't need that in your life."

Far from being offended, Sanguini laughed. "Shy, as eloquent as ever. I see you've brought one of your pets. Surely dolls cannot be nearly as frightening as venomous snakes."

Harry did a double take as he realised that the huge, raised collar swallowing half of Shy's face was in fact concealing a serpentine passenger. The dusty golden coils looped around her neck were thicker than Harry's arms.

"I disagree. This is Harry, and he's adorable and perfectly well-behaved," said Shy, patting the snake, who shifted sleepily. Its wedge-shaped head peeked above the collar and its tongue flickered out, before it withdrew a moment later.

"Harry, named after Harry?" Sanguini asked, looking from the snake to the human.

"Who else?" said Shy. "Come on, let's go somewhere with more space so I can let him down."

She dragged Harry away, and he waved goodbye to Eldred and Sanguini when it seemed they would not follow.

"Ha, you're lucky I showed up before Sanguini decided to give you a full tour of his house. That old geezer has his whole life's work in there, like hundreds of dolls. I'm not even exaggerating, and every single one of them is creepy as f—heck," Shy coughed, winking at him. "Now, don't get me wrong, I know I'm obsessed with snakes and that's weird, but at least I ask if the other guy likes snakes too before siccing them all on him."

"How old is he?" Harry asked. "Sanguini?"

Shy waved abstractly. "Like two hundred or something. Ancient."

"Can vampires live forever?" Harry asked.

"Well we're technically dead, so is it even living?" Shy pointed out, shrugging. "But probably not. I hear there's all sorts of nasty stuff that comes with old age, like you have to drink a lot more blood to keep the wrinkles away and you're liable to go stark raving mad. Sanguini's the oldest guy I know. I suppose he's still pretty in touch… for a geriatric corpse. Come on, Harry."

She was addressing the snake, crouching down and urging it to slip into the grass. It growled in a disconcerting way, but obligingly descended.

"Sleepy…" it murmured, rustling about in discontent. "Cold."

"He's cold," Harry said. "Should I cast a warming charm?"

Shy shrugged. "Go ahead."

" _Calesco!_ " Harry cast. A hot burst of air shot out of his wand, and the snake reared back, hooding up with a pained hiss. Harry swore. "Sorry, I forgot—my magic's a bit finicky still. New wand." He bent down to apologise to the snake as well.

"Too cold. Too hot. Difficult," the snake summarised, calming down again. It slithered closer to Harry and tentatively began to wind up his legs. "Warm."

"Great, he likes you," Shy concluded, grinning. "Can you hold him for me for a sec? I want to get a drink but I can't bring him near the friends. His venom's deadly to them. You should be fine, since you're a wizard and all, but let me know if he bites you… I mean, it'd probably still hurt."

Harry blinked, and she was gone, leaving him to snake-sit a three metre long monster, which was now curling around his shoulders. He patted it awkwardly.

"So, where are you from?" he asked the snake. It turned and glanced up at him with round, guileless eyes.

"A warm place with moving water," the snake said.

"Do you miss it?" Harry asked.

The snake shifted its considerable girth. Harry felt squished, like he was wearing a heavy blanket. "No. My new home is good. There are nice hiding spots and plenty of prey, though it is always dead. The live ones talk too much, and are annoying, but I cannot get to them." A discontented hiss.

Harry blinked, trying to decipher what the snake was talking about. Did it eat other snakes?

It continued, "The one that brings the prey sometimes talks like you do, but it never listens to me. You are listening to me, right?"

"I'm listening," Harry confirmed.

"I am cold. Make it warmer," it ordered. Raising a brow, Harry took his wand out and practised the hot air charm a few times to the side to make sure he could do it properly, before casting it on himself and the snake. "Yes. Now carry me to the trees," the snake commanded, flicking its tongue out in the direction of the yew grove.

Harry glanced over to the refreshment table, where he saw several vampires with their faces buried in the necks of Silviu's friends. He winced, something about the sight of their slack, placid faces unsettling him. The scar on his own neck twinged. He finally located Shy, waiting in a queue, and decided that he had some time before she returned, so could indulge the request.

As soon as he neared the grove, the cobra slid down onto the ground and shot towards the nearest tree, wriggling expertly up the veined trunk until it reached the first branch, where it slung its weight over the side and paused to look around. It occurred belatedly to Harry that it would be awkward if he ended up losing Shy's snake. But it wasn't like he was strong enough to wrestle three metres of sinuous muscle, so she couldn't blame him, could she?

"You're coming back, right?" Harry called after it, hoping he could simply talk it down.

"I wish to explore this place," it shouted back. It was strange—the wind was blowing the wrong way and Harry was sure no sound as soft as a hiss could have carried that distance, but he heard the snake's words clearly, as if they'd been said into his ear, and obviously it had understood his question well enough to respond.

Narrowing his eyes, Harry stepped back a few paces, until he couldn't make out the murky gold of the cobra nestled in the tangle of bare branches. He knew it was still there, though.

"Can you hear me?" he whispered.

"Yes. Where are you going? Are you bringing food?" came the snake's voice, but the sound simply could not have travelled that far. So of course, it wasn't a sound. It had never been a sound, obviously. Snakes didn't communicate with sound.

Heart racing, Harry took a few more steps back, finally daring to turn around and walk towards to the tent. "I'm testing something," he murmured under his breath, still picturing supple coils and curious eyes. "I'll see if I can get some food."

"Hurry," the snake agreed.

How far was too far away? He didn't notice any difference in response time.

"Let's keep talking," Harry said. "Tell me about… your food. What kinds of food do you like?"

"Inferior snakes are satisfying prey. Sometimes I eat the short ones that skitter about. If I smell them, I will follow them, and then I strike! But I smell only tiny scaleless creatures here, nothing good to eat, or others of your kind, larger than you. Be wary of them," the snake said.

Harry supposed it thought that people also ate other smaller people. Then again, he supposed, glancing at the vampires drinking the friends' blood, it wasn't exactly wrong.

"Harry—where's Harry?" Shy whispered, and Harry realised that he had ventured too close to the tent. An unknown vampire leered at him with interest, but Harry ignored him.

"He's there," Harry said, pointing towards the trees. "I'm trying to test how far I can hear him from."

Shy's worried look didn't ease, but she nodded. "And you can still hear him from here?"

Harry cleared his throat and focused on the snake again. "Hello, Harry, can you still hear me?"

"Have you found food yet?" came the reply with alacrity. Harry nodded.

"Yeah, he wants food," he said.

Shy relaxed and rolled her eyes. "He ate two days ago. That glutton doesn't need more food."

"I sort of promised, though," Harry said, wondering how he was going to get a cranky snake down from a tall tree. Perhaps if he commanded it, he could test whether Parseltongue could actually control snakes rather than just communicate, but he didn't want to see the results if it didn't work.

"Why don't you magic up a python to tempt him with? When it disappears just tell him it got away and he should work harder next time," Shy suggested.

Harry had forgotten all about _serpensortia_ , but Shy made a good point. He thanked her and ran back towards the yew grove. He didn't really know what a python looked like, but the metre-long reticulated snake that shot out the end of his wand was certainly nothing like the little grey one he'd conjured last week, so he counted it a success.

Harry the snake perked up instantly in the tree and dangled over the branch until it dropped down entirely into the grass with a faint rustle. "Scent… stalk… strike…" it hissed, repeating these words like a mantra. The conjured python curled up sluggishly where it had landed, saying nothing. Human Harry wondered if he'd left out its brain, since it didn't seem to notice the enormous predator practically announcing its intentions just metres away.

"Shouldn't you be more subtle?" Harry asked. The python swung around to face him in confusion.

"Yes, distract it," said the rapidly approaching king cobra, "distract it, and I will strike!"

A wide-open mouth shot out of the grass, closing on open air. The cobra's face smashed into the dirt as the python vanished with a faint pop. A comical moan of devastated bewilderment seemed to hang in the air. The cobra's head came up, hood flared in consternation.

"How?" it demanded, swaying in all directions and flicking its tongue out rapidly. "Where has the prey escaped to? I cannot smell it any longer. How can this be?"

Despite himself, Harry had to slap a hand over his face to keep his laughter in. It was a mean joke to play, he thought, but he couldn't let on that he had had any hand in it.

"That's unfortunate," he said, lip twitching. "Maybe next time."

"It was good of you to distract it," the snake allowed. "My strike should have landed. I saw it right there, right in front of me. But then it was somehow gone."

"How come it didn't notice you?" Harry asked.

The snake looked up at him and Harry felt like he was being judged. "I was being very stealthy. You wouldn't have seen me either if I hadn't signalled you. Pick me up. I want to nap. It's cold again."

Harry grabbed its tail gingerly in both hands and heaved it over his shoulder. The snake swung around him in a loose coils, and Harry stroked its soft scales absently. He had to experiment more later, perhaps with conjured snakes. If Parseltongue wasn't based on sound, then it stood to reason that the cobra really could have spoken to him alone without alerting another snake. And if that was the case, then combined with the long range whose limit he hadn't yet found, the opportunities for spying on people seemed endless.

Not that Harry wanted to spy on people randomly, but he could think of a few situations where it would have been helpful. He could have tailed Quirrell far more easily last year (though perhaps using snakes to watch the Dark Lord would not have ended well) and he could have had a snake report on Penelope's status instead of having to check it himself at every opportunity.

Well, that was supposing he could get his snake conjuration to last more than an unreliable few minutes.

Shy appeared at his side a few minutes later, brow furrowed and fists clenched. Harry couldn't help taking a step back as she turned to him with a burning glare. It softened momentarily as she took in his flinch.

"Sorry," she muttered, looking away. "Thanks for watching Harry. I'll take him back now."

She held out her arms, but neither Harry moved.

Wizard Harry pressed his lips together, on edge. "Are you all right?"

Shy heaved a sigh. "I'm fine. I'm just annoyed. Some people are so careless."

Harry blinked at her in confusion. A moment later, a pale blur rocketed between them, resolving into a somewhat dishevelled Ness, clad in a long white coat.

"Are you okay?" they asked Shy, who groaned and buried her face in her hands.

"I'm not the one who's not okay," she said. "Trocar's killed Sean. I'm just mad."

"Damn it, of course it was him! I'm sorry," said Ness, pulling her into a hug. "I'll talk to him."

"No, I'm sure the chairman will do enough talking," Shy murmured, shaking her head.

Harry, who was still standing there under five kilograms of snake, was trying very hard to make sense of this conversation. Finally, he couldn't help blurting, "Sorry, who's been killed?"

Ness tensed, apparently only just noticing him. They glanced around nervously, as if searching for something, but relaxed after a few moments. "One of the friends," they said. Harry's head whipped back towards the tent, but he saw no sign of any scuffle or disturbance that could suggest that someone had died. People were still milling about casually, and light chatter filled the night.

"This happens every year," Shy muttered. "I should get used to it. It's funny, I never used to care back when it could have been me. I know none of them care. They want it, even. Sean was probably ecstatic to let Trocar drink him dry. I don't know. It just puts a bad taste in my mouth."

Ness didn't say anything. They held Shy more tightly and stared into the distance, expression conflicted. Harry approached and cautiously set the snake's head on Shy's arm. Whether this was an appropriate gesture of comfort or not, Shy still accepted it, stroking the cobra on the back of its hood and coaxing it to slide onto her shoulders.

Harry couldn't stop staring at the tent, desperately looking for some kind of evidence that anything out of the ordinary had happened. But no sign was forthcoming, no matter how long he watched. The name 'Sean' rang a bell, and he could almost put a face to it. A gangly, smiling boy.

"Will he become a vampire?" he couldn't help asking.

Shy sighed heavily. "They never do. They're too happy for it. I'm the only one who ever—forget it." She pressed her lips together. "I'm going back to the shop. No, Ness, you stay here. Seriously, I'm fine."

She stalked off, disappearing into a shadow. Ness laughed tonelessly. "I'm sorry you had to hear all that," they told Harry. "Shy's gets so sentimental about the friends, projects her own feelings onto them. I suppose she's still young. But you shouldn't get the wrong idea—they're really just muggles, nothing like you or I."

Ness said this with such earnestness that Harry didn't know where to start.

"Didn't Shy used to be a muggle?" he asked finally, wondering if he'd remembered wrong, but Ness nodded, waving their hand dismissively.

"Yes, but it's not like wizards with pure-bloods and muggle-borns. We get our magic from our company, and the change burns out any impurities. I mean, just look at how clever Shy is now. No trace of mugglishness there." They smiled fondly.

"Do you change a lot when you become a vampire?" Harry asked, sceptical. From what he knew, it seemed like vampires kept the same soul from before they had died, so it stood to reason that there ought not to be any personality changes.

"Not normally, I don't think," Ness confirmed. "But with muggles it's a much bigger change, isn't it? They weren't even magical before—it's a total transformation. For me, it wasn't much different, really. I was practically born a vampire."

At Harry's confused look, Ness elaborated, "My parents were both in Granny Trocar's company. She was the old chair."

"Trocar?" Harry interrupted, glancing back to the tent. "Like the one who—"

"Yeah, that was Lionel Trocar, her grandson and my cousin," Ness said, rolling their eyes for some reason. "But Granny Trocar's been dust for years. Thank Merlin I hadn't changed before the chairman deposed her."

'Deposed' sounded ominous, but Harry didn't ask. Instead, he said, "I don't think I've met this Lionel Trocar before. Is he in the company? What's he look like?"

"He's a secondary," said Ness, smiling with their fangs on clear display. "I was the one who changed him, and I reckon he'll be sour about that for the rest of his sorry life. He's over there, if you want to meet him, but I don't recommend it. He's a right prick."

They nodded towards the far side of the tent, where Silviu was talking to a pasty blond vampire. Harry finally realised that some of the tension in his shoulders was actually external, from his mental connection to Silviu. The blond vampire, Trocar, had his arms crossed like a petulant child. He didn't look like a murderer. Perhaps he didn't realise that muggles were people either. Harry shivered.

"Why did you… change him if you don't like him?" Harry asked.

"You're right. I should have left him to die," Ness said cheerfully. "But no, we needed him. He's good at what he does—the best. Don't tell him that, though, or his overinflated ego might just burst."

"What does he do?" Harry asked. He glanced in Trocar's direction again, and for a moment, their eyes met. The vampire broke eye contact almost immediately.

"He's an undertaker. That was the old company business, but the chairman's expanded us far beyond that now. Oh look, he's coming over here. You'd better leave if you want to spare yourself a headache," Ness said.

Harry's curiosity had been piqued, so he stayed where he was, eyeing the approaching vampire warily. From this close, the resemblance to Ness was striking, though Trocar had a much stronger jawline and a pale blue spiral tattooed under his left eye.

"Ness," he greeted with a nod, "have you seen Shyverwretch? I'm to apologise to her for eating her favourite friend. Really, if she wanted him for herself, she should've claimed him first—"

"I don't recommend telling her sorry and then blaming her in the same breath. Somehow, I don't see that working out for you," Ness said. Trocar grunted.

"I shall take that under advisement," he muttered, looking around. "Where is she?"

Ness shrugged unhelpfully. Trocar's cold blue gaze lingered on Harry for a long moment, before his eyes widened.

"Are you—you're Harry Potter?" he blurted, and then to Harry's immense surprise, dropped to one knee.

"Merlin, Trocar, stop embarrassing yourself in public," Ness yelled. Then they did a double take at Harry. "You're Harry Potter. I didn't—no—I knew that, of course I did…"

While Ness was processing this revelation, Trocar raised his head and gave Harry an expectant look. Uncertainly, Harry held out his silver hand, and the vampire clasped hands with him. "Lionel Trocar, at your service. I did hear that there was a new primary, but I didn't realise that the chairman had recruited such a distinguished figure. Please allow me to pledge my blood to you."

Ness's palm met their face with an audible smack. "Are you seriously trying to smarm up to a kid with etiquette from the last century? You're more out of touch than I thought."

Since Ness didn't expect him to know what was going on, Harry thought it would be safe to ask, "What does that mean? Pledging blood?"

"It means he's shamelessly trying to replace his boss right in front them," Ness said, scowling.

"What's the harm? It isn't as if you care for me, cousin," Trocar said, getting to his feet. His eyes were locked on Ness now, and he took a threatening step forward. Ness's arm shot out and seized the front of Trocar's robe.

"Watch yourself," Ness hissed. Trocar grinned, tilting his head back to expose his throat.

"I apologise," he said, eyes gleaming entirely apologetically. "Perhaps you should punish me for my insolence?"

Ness dragged him closer, leaning in, and for a moment Harry thought they would bite Trocar. But they only said, in a harsh whisper, "I would love to, but I know you're just trying to get me in trouble with the chairman. Do you think I'm some kind of moron? Get out of my sight, and I don't want you talking to any other primary members unless it's for business."

Ness shoved him away, and Trocar twisted into a bow, though his raised eyes glinted mockingly. "I understand, but what about Shyverwretch? The chairman said—"

"I'll pass along your apology," Ness said with finality.

"Much appreciated," said Trocar with a smug smile, before he turned around and walked off with purpose.

Ness swore. "Of course, that was exactly what he wanted."

Harry felt awkward to have witnessed that family spat. Ness finally seemed to remember that he was there, and shot him an apologetic grimace. He shrugged and tried to move to a better subject.

"I've been wondering—what exactly is this handshake?" Harry held out his hand again with his elbow pointing down.

Ness sighed. "It's just a formal greeting, like you agree to be civil and not fight. You did it correctly with Trocar. Don't take him too seriously. He's obsessed with our traditional customs. Can't get over the fact that he had to sit through years of Granny grooming him to be the heir, only to be rendered irrelevant."

"Sil—the chairman mentioned something about customs to me once, I think," Harry said, screwing up his face as he tried to remember. They hadn't discussed any details, but for some reason he felt like he could recognise whether something was polite or not if he were to see it.

"We don't really care about them these days," Ness said. "The chairman's philosophy is that we need to integrate ourselves into wizarding society if we're ever to get respect. Since we don't live in isolated conclaves up in the mountains anymore, it doesn't make sense to continue traditions based on that kind of lifestyle."

Ness reported all this as a matter of fact, though there was ambivalence in their eyes.

"Gather round, everyone!" Silviu's amplified voice cut through the ambient noise. The background music came to a halt. "It's almost time for Auld Lang Syne. Gather round!"

Ness perked up. "Right, I should go get Shy, tell her the coast's clear if she wants to come back."

They darted off with a parting wave, and Harry was alone in the crowd. He tried to spot Eldred or Sanguini, but one was short and the other dark so he was met with little success as a multitude of taller bodies jostled him about. He eventually found himself with his arms crossed, holding hands with two of the friends. They seemed to have all emerged from the refreshments tent to join the festivities, many of them smiling openly.

A little disturbed, Harry turned to the girl on his left with a cautious, "Hello."

She glanced at him with a cheerful mien. "Hello! Oh—your hand. Is it made of metal? I thought it was cold because you were one of the vampires. Sorry. I'm Cindy. I don't think I've seen you around before. Are you new?"

Blindsided by this sudden stream of chatter, Harry stared dumbly at her for a few moments before he managed to respond. "I'm Harry. My hand—I'm not actually sure what it's made of. I'm not a friend, exactly… the only other person I really know is Sean. Do you know him?"

He almost cringed at his own question, but Cindy's smile hardly faltered. "Of course I do. Oh, he was so lucky to be chosen!"

"Chosen?" Harry repeated, narrowing his eyes.

"You didn't hear? One of the secondaries picked him to change. I'm so jealous." Cindy sighed. Harry blinked. Did they believe that Sean was going to become a vampire? Shy and Ness had dismissed the possibility earlier.

The boy on Harry's right laughed. "What's there to be jealous of? He won't make it."

"Probably not," Cindy agreed. "Still. Just the chance of it is worth it, don't you think?"

"I suppose so," said the boy.

The string quartet began to play, and Silviu led the circle into the first verse: "Should auld aquaintance be forgot…"

Harry's mind blanked, like a large hand had swooped in and physically crushed his thoughts to smooth sand. He was suddenly beyond himself, everywhere in the circle, cradled by the powerful timbre of Silviu's baritone resonating with a dozen others in an enchanting web. Harry's mouth moved along automatically with the words. They finished the verse. Or had they just started it? The drone of voices rattled his ribcage in time with the pounding of his heart. He could hear the rushing of a river of blood through the circle, one pulsing, living entity stitched together by that sound.

A deafening bang brought Harry back to his senses. He wasn't holding hands with Cindy and the other boy any longer—somehow he'd fallen over and was lying on his back in the damp grass, staring up at a starburst of dazzling colour. Belatedly, he realised that it was a firework. His ears came back to life with a sucking sensation and all around him he heard people laughing and wishing each other a happy New Year.

"Harry! Harry, come up here." Somehow, Silviu's voice cut straight through the din without him shouting. Harry scrambled to his feet and followed it up to the very top of the hill, where Silviu was standing with Eldred and Annette. All three of them had their wands pointing overhead, spewing colourful sparks into the night sky.

"There you are, Harry, come and help us put on a show," Silviu said, clapping him on the back with his free hand.

The audience shouted and whistled as Eldred sent a bright blue spark dragon rocketing through the air, spitting orange fireballs.

He winked at Harry. "Come on now, my dear boy, plenty of adult supervision here tonight. Show us what you've got!"

His good cheer was infectious. Harry, forgetting his trepidation, raised his holly wand to the sky, straightening up and facing the crowd with a grin as confidence surged through him. " _Vermillious!_ "

A blinding ball of red light shot into the sky, exploding into a geometric shower of sparks. Changing the pattern was probably something like manipulating _flagrate_ after casting, Harry thought. He shot off another overpowered bunch of sparks, willing them to disperse in a spiral. The crowd cheered and clapped as they produced ever more ambitious designs. Harry's head started to ache just behind his eyes from the exertion of it all.

After the impromptu fireworks show, most people began to meander back towards the block of coffin houses. Annette herded the friends into a corner, where they queued up neatly like schoolchildren, while Harry found himself wedged between Eldred and Sanguini, who had melted out of the darkness to meet them.

"Marvellous work, my sweet, and you as well, Harry," he praised, still clapping. "A lovely show to welcome the new year. Would you be interested in joining us for a spot of lunch?"

"You've read my mind," said Eldred, chortling and turning to squint expectantly at Harry. "I was just about to extend the invitation."

Remembering Shy's warning about Sanguini's dolls, he felt the familiar onset of a morbid curiosity that would not be denied. "Sure, I'd love to, if it's no trouble."

"No trouble at all, dear boy, no trouble at all," Eldred assured him. They made a brief stop at the refreshments table so that Eldred could retrieve his cauldron, then traversed the row of neat headstones opposite the path Harry usually took, pausing just out of reach of a patch of thorny vines. "Now, don't be intimidated by the tentacula. You can scare it off with an angry voice. Swearing at it usually does the trick. If you'll pardon my colourful language…" Eldred cleared his throat, took a firm step forward, and used his wand to swat at the tentacles that came shooting at him. "Fuck off!"

The vines fucked off, with some help perhaps from a wordless severing charm. Harry stifled a giggle as Sanguini ushered him through the cleared path up to their front door. The coffin was a traditional one, with bevelled edges and a dark varnish, and the lid had to be shoved aside.

The interior was simply astonishing. Harry's jaw dropped as he descended into a brightly-lit chamber that he could only liken to an auditorium. It wasn't overly large, but it was deep, almost twice as high as a normal room, and its terraced walls were absolutely crammed with people. Dolls, Harry's logic reminded him, but his eyes begged to differ. They sat, frozen but uncannily vivacious, like a snapshot of an audience at the theatre. Some stared eagerly forwards, gripping the edges of their seats, while others leaned back in relaxed inattention or were preserved in the act of whispering to their neighbours. Every one of them was life-sized, and there were adults and children, men and women, humans but also a variety of humanoids in an assortment of shapes and colours, all clad in sumptuous finery. Shy had been right; there had to be a hundred of them at least.

A gentle nudge from behind him reminded Harry that he was blocking the door. Tearing his eyes away from the walls, he finished traversing the rest of the steps. When he finally reached the bottom, it felt like stepping onto a stage outfitted with a table and chairs to look like the inside of somebody's house. It didn't seem real.

"Don't mind the dolls," said Eldred, waving his wand in a wide arc. A thick velvet curtain drew itself around the room, and the prickling sensation of being watched vanished, though Harry knew intellectually that there hadn't been any real eyes in the first place.

"Oh, _zuccherino_ , you're no fun," Sanguini complained, slinking down the steps.

"You can show them to Harry later, if he wants to see them. You know most people find them unsettling," Eldred admonished with fond exasperation. He turned to a stone table in the back of the room which was outfitted with several hot plates and shoved the cauldron in his hand underneath it. He then took out a different cauldron and set it on top.

"Can I help?" Harry asked. Eldred waved a hand.

"I'm just whipping up a quick minestrone soup. It'll only be a few minutes," he said, levitating carrots and potatoes out of a box and setting an enchanted knife to dice them.

Harry, unable to help himself, turned to Sanguini and asked, gesturing to the closed curtain, "How did you make them so lifelike?"

"Meticulous study of the human form, along with a good understanding of alchemy," the vampire said.

"Alchemy, you mentioned that before," Harry remembered. "I thought alchemy was about changing things into other things? But not like transfiguration."

He flushed, realising that he clearly didn't know what he was talking about. Sanguini nodded, edging towards the curtain and beckoning for Harry to come closer. They both glanced at Eldred, who was humming to himself as he filled the cauldron with water.

They slipped past the curtain, and Sanguini stroked the cheek of a girl dressed in a bright blue pinafore dress. The doll sprang to her feet, and it took every ounce of self-control Harry had to swallow a surprised yelp.

"Yes, you can think of alchemy as the union of transfiguration and potions—the outward effect is similar to transfiguration, but what is actually happening underneath is an irreversible reaction, a fundamental change," Sanguini explained. "Observe the eyes."

Harry looked, and it was exactly like meeting the eyes of a living girl. Limpid grey gazed back at him with demure interest.

"They're—very realistic," he said, swallowing.

"Because they're real," Sanguini said, smiling like a cat. Harry's heart lurched in horror before the man elaborated, "I have painstakingly crafted them to match the living human eye… it is the only way to capture a properly lifelike look, I've found. Glass eyes have a hardness to them that cannot stand up to discerning inspection."

"Are they… alive? I thought you can't make living flesh with magic," Harry said.

Sanguini shook his head. "Living flesh—there's nothing that distinguishes it from any other substance in nature. The exception that you are thinking of is transfiguring something that can interface with an existing living thing." He gestured to Harry's silver hand. "A replacement limb, for example. Even that may not be strictly impossible to transmute, but of course the dangers far outweigh the possible benefits."

"What are the dangers?" Harry asked.

"Transmutation is irreversible, as I mentioned, and transmutation of living things is extremely delicate and not entirely controllable. One stroke of misfortune might result in anything from a set of extra joints to a cancerous growth. Even if all goes well physically, there's no telling how the soul would be affected," Sanguini said.

Harry frowned. "You're saying alchemy changes the soul?"

"Not usually," Sanguini said, holding up both hands. "It's not dark magic. Still, better to stay away from human transmutation just to be safe. I create flesh and blood only for my dolls."

"Blood?" Harry asked. "They even have blood?"

Sanguini smirked. "Not the drinkable kind, alas, but they do have something like a circulatory system, to help them retain colour and warmth. See for yourself."

The girl doll reached out and grasped Harry, her slim hands on his arm soft and warm. Harry swallowed as a strange feeling overtook him. He could feel her pulse against his skin, regular but strangely intense.

"Ah, ah," sighed the doll, and he jumped.

"Can they talk?" he demanded.

"Not in words, no," said Sanguini. "That's the circulation mechanism you're hearing, and they can make some basic sounds. Sometimes Eldred will charm them to say things, but that's going a little far, in my opinion."

"I can hear you, you know!" Eldred called through the curtain. "Come out here. The food's nearly done."

Sanguini laughed, but obligingly tapped the doll's shoulder. She sat back down and folded her arms, going still, and he brushed the curtain aside, gesturing for Harry to precede him. They settled at the table just as Eldred levitated a steaming cauldron of soup onto the centre, along with three bowls. A ladle flew through the air and landed in the cauldron with a splash, where it then proceeded to serve each of them a generous portion.

"What are they for?" Harry asked Sanguini, gaze still fixed on the curtains, though he could no longer see the faces behind them.

"Oh," Sanguini began with clear hesitation, and to his right, Eldred spluttered and went red for some reason. "Well, you can use them for anything that you'd normally use a doll for. For example, er, puppet shows."

"Quite right," said Eldred, coughing into a handkerchief. Harry got the feeling that they weren't being completely forthright with him, but he supposed it probably wasn't important, so he tucked into his soup.

"This is really good," he said. The soup was rich with savoury tomato and fresh herbs, along with an assortment of pasta and veg. As hungry as he was, he cleared his bowl almost as quickly as if someone had cast a vanishing charm.

"I'm glad you think so," Eldred said. "Cooking is just a step to the left of potion-making, so I should hope to be passable at it. Do you enjoy potion-making, Harry?"

"It's all right. I'm not very good. I mean, I can follow the instructions, but my stirring is never exactly right," Harry mumbled.

Eldred leaned forwards with a conspiratorial mien. "I'll let you in on a little secret that I'm sure your texts haven't covered yet—there are two types of stirring. Stirring unreactive ingredients distributes them physically, while stirring reactive ingredients combines them magically. Instructions will often say to stir a certain number of times, but you only want to count exact stirs for magical reactions. Otherwise, you should pay attention to the colour and consistency of the brew and let those guide you. Intuition is very important for a potioneer." He tapped the side of his head with one finger.

Harry had a feeling that this advice was actually very advanced. He had no idea how he was supposed to tell if he had stirred the right amount or not, and thought he'd rather take his chances with the instructions. At least then, there was only a limited number of marks he could get off. Still, he smiled and nodded. "Thanks, I'll try that next time."

He admitted that he had no stove or hot plate at home, and was referred to half a dozen shops when he asked Eldred about where he got his potion-making equipment.

"The cauldron is all you really need," Sanguini protested. "You can impart heat magically."

"My dear, don't mislead the boy. He hasn't got a hundred years to practise wandless magic," Eldred said.

"It's simple," Sanguini insisted.

"Wandless magic?" Harry repeated, and Eldred groaned. Sanguini grinned.

"You apply it directly with your hands and your eyes. We vampires are not allowed to carry wands, as I'm sure you know, so we must make do. The effects we can achieve are smaller, subtler, but no less useful."

"It's far too difficult to bother with, if you've got a wand," Eldred said. "He's tried to teach me for years and has had nothing to show for it, so now he's setting his sights on a new target. My dear boy, don't be fooled. Humans are tool users! We aren't meant to do magic with only our bare hands."

"My sweet is spoiled, so used to getting whatever he wants," Sanguini murmured, reaching out to pat Eldred slyly on the head. "If he never wishes to practice, how can he learn?"

Eldred rolled his eyes. Sanguini turned to Harry again, sobering.

"I'd noticed that your wand hand is your right hand," he said. "If you'll forgive me for the impropriety, I'm very curious about your prosthesis. I wasn't aware that it was possible to connect to a wand through quicksilver. May I ask who the maker is?"

Harry blinked down at his hand. It did look quite like quicksilver, packed into a solid form. "I don't know. Sorry," he said. Sanguini stared at him with a piercing greenish gaze, and Harry wondered if he could tell that he was lying.

"Quicksilver is the traditional alchemy base for transmuting living matter," Sanguini said. "However, it is a very poor conductor of magic, and difficult to work with, so that is why I'm surprised. Would you mind terribly if I were to examine it?"

"Sanguini!" Eldred cried, flushing. "My dear boy, I must apologise—Sanguini has a one-track mind when it comes to his craft."

It would probably be better to deny him, Harry thought. Close inspection might reveal that the hand was cursed, and that would raise all sorts of awkward questions. Any incautious tampering might even trigger some unpleasant side effect from the curse.

"It's all right," his mouth said without the permission of his common sense, because he wanted to know. He extended his arm. "Have a look."

Sanguini gestured for him to scoot his chair closer, then took his hand delicately into his larger one. The vampire tapped a finger gently against Harry's prosthesis. Though the tip of the claw looked like it had been filed down, it was still thick and hard, and made a tinny sound, as if striking solid metal. Harry felt only a glancing pressure.

"How strong is your grip?" Sanguini asked. "Close your fist and try to prevent me from prying it open."

Harry did so, bracing himself, and watched in astonishment as Sanguini tried to wedge his claws under the silver fingers but met with no success.

"Fascinating," Sanguini murmured. "It's as I thought. Quicksilver is ever passing between life and death. It should yield like flesh, and yet become immovable when called upon. But to make a false limb of it! It must be monstrously strong. Hmm. Yes. Try to break the table."

"I'm sorry, what?" Harry said. A panicked Eldred levitated the leftovers out of the way just as Sanguini turned to demonstrate, slamming his fist into the wood. It splintered with a horrible crack, and the vampire grunted, pulling back his bloodied hand with a resonant hiss.

"Like that," he said, rubbing at his fingers, which restored themselves peculiarly before Harry's eyes, blood sinking back into the pale flesh. Muttering under his breath, Eldred repaired the table with a sweep of his wand.

"Are you sure?" Harry asked after a pause, glancing to Eldred, who shrugged at him and rolled his eyes. Gritting his teeth, Harry braced himself and punched down with all his strength.

CRACK.

Harry overbalanced and found himself up to his shoulder in table splinters, with Eldred and Sanguini staring wide-eyed at the hole he'd made.

"Are you all right?" Eldred recovered his wits first, rushing forwards to check Harry for any injury. "I should've known it would be a bad idea… I didn't think it would actually—"

"I'm fine," Harry said, a somewhat bewildered laugh tumbling from his lips. Wincing, he extricated himself and rubbed at his shoulder, which was a little bruised but otherwise unhurt.

Sanguini clapped his hands together in delight.

Eldred cast a healing charm at Harry and sighed. "I think that's enough experimentation for tonight."

"Thanks. Sorry," Harry said sheepishly, but Eldred shook his head.

"Oh no, no need to apologise, my dear boy." He swivelled around to face Sanguini and pointed at him. "I'm talking to this one."

"Yes, yes, of course, my sweet. No more experiments," Sanguini agreed, holding up both hands. "Thank you for indulging my curiosity, Harry."

"Right. Thanks for lunch," Harry said, smiling apologetically at Eldred as he glanced to the repaired table. "I… I'd better get going. My uncle's probably wondering where I am."

Petri obviously hadn't been wondering any such thing. When Harry descended into their coffin, the man hardly looked up from where he was sitting in the back, measuring out strands of some sort of silvery hair. Harry sighed and headed for the trunk to try conjuring Ulrich again.

Setting up the mirror in front of a tall stool and taking out the resurrection stone had become routine by now. Harry took out both his wands, considering each of them briefly, before putting away the willow. His right-handed magic still worked much better, and he needed every advantage he could get. He pressed his lips together as he glanced into the mirror, testing his wand movement. He wasn't really even expecting it to work. That was bad, wasn't it?

There wasn't anything wrong with his wandwork. At the first murmured, " _Spiritus revocatur_ ," the image of Ulrich's face, now as familiar to him as his own, solidified in the mirror. But it was static. It did not think, did not know.

Some time later, soft footfalls and the rustling of robes alerted him to Petri's entrance. Harry did not glance up until the man's reflection appeared in the mirror, looking over his shoulder.

"Still nothing?" he asked.

Harry grunted.

"Hm. Not unexpected. It's a difficult exercise, though I admit… I'd hoped that it would come naturally to you, as reconstruction did," Petri said.

"What does this have to do with reconstruction?" Harry asked, glancing automatically to the locked cabinet that held the pensieve. The people in memories were, well memories. This was the conjuration of an actual soul!

"It's the same concept, really," Petri said, furrowing his brow. "You must connect to the dead, as if they were living. Only, I would think it's more difficult to achieve in reconstruction, since you have no direct control. With conjuration, you are at least holding the wand."

Harry glanced down at his wand, still uncertain how that was relevant. One thing had suddenly become clear to him, however. Petri was right. He hadn't been thinking of Ulrich as a person. He'd been so focused on the image, on Ulrich's personality, his memories—but for all that he had still been a something, not a someone. Ulrich's spirit, rather than Ulrich himself.

"You should eat," Petri said, setting a phial of nutritive potion on the table with a soft clink. Harry looked up and wrinkled his nose.

"Eldred told me real food is cheaper than nutritive potion. Stew, I think he said," he said. Nonetheless, he picked up the phial and downed the potion.

Petri snorted. "If you make it yourself, perhaps. But time is money."

"We have Rosenkol," Harry pointed out.

"I prefer to conserve Rosenkol's usefulness," was Petri's cryptic response.

"What does that even mean?" Harry demanded.

"Exactly what it sounds like. The time he has left to manifest without a proper house is limited. The more house-elf-like tasks he has to do, the more it taxes his coherence," Petri said.

Harry sat up straight. "The time he has left—you don't mean he's dying?"

Petri sneered. "Everybody is always dying. But yes. House elves need a house, one steeped in generations of history, in order to manifest properly. Take away their purpose and they will fade away, vanishing forever. I have tried to give Rosenkol a new purpose, enough to keep him alive, but it is difficult enough for him to keep him away from his nature without the added complication of expecting him to do menial tasks."

"Wait, so I've been killing him, trying to show him how to cook?" Harry demanded, horrified.

"Don't be dramatic," Petri said, rolling his eyes. "He can survive cooking if he wants to, as long as he does not have to."

"He needs a house, right? So what if you sent him to work at Hogwarts?" Harry asked. There were dozens of house elves there, so the castle had to count as a house, right?

Petri rolled his eyes. "And allow Dumbledore to get his hands on all my secrets?"

"But then Rosenkol wouldn't die," Harry protested. "I thought you cared about him."

"I care about him, because he belongs to me," Petri said, his tone clipped. "The situation isn't so dire, anyway. Like I said, I've been able to divert his purpose for the most part."

"How did you get him, anyway?" Harry asked, shoving his dissatisfaction down into his gut. He knew better than to argue further.

"I inherited him from a friend," Petri said.

"Wait." Harry narrowed his eyes. "I thought Rosenkol killed his last master?"

"The one before that. My friend's father," Petri confirmed, his expression closing off. "An extremely unpleasant man, by any account."

Petri fell silent, perhaps lost in a memory, and Harry let the subject go, turning back to his conjuration. He had to really want to find Ulrich. But what was it that made Ulrich who he was? The more he thought about it, the less it made sense. It didn't seem like any quality of a person could actually be requisite for their identity. Everything about them was important, certainly, but at the same time, nothing, no one thing, was important by itself.

But he didn't have to conjure Ulrich out of nothing, he reminded himself. Ulrich was already tied to the stone. Harry twirled the stone absently in his hand. "How exactly does the stone work, though?"

He glanced to the side and his heart skipped a beat as he found no one. Twisting around, he searched the entire room, but Petri must have left without his noticing. Chuckling nervously to himself, Harry held up the stone and peered at it, as if he might see a miniature Ulrich staring out at him from inside.

Well, why not? He couldn't see anything but his own blurred reflection in its opaque surface, but if Ulrich was already inside the stone, why couldn't Harry just pull him out and put him in the mirror?

" _Spiritus revocatur_ , _"_ He began, and instead of focusing on the mirror, held the stone up to eye-level as he sketched the trefoil knot, imagining that he was drawing something out and directing it to the glass.

Ulrich's image sharpened and blinked at him.

"Hello?" he murmured, squinting. "Who are you?"

Harry almost dropped his wand. After everything he'd tried, it was _this_ that ended up working? It took him several seconds to pick up his jaw, during which Ulrich seemed to have come to some conclusion.

"You're Harry Potter, right?"

"Yes, I'm Harry. You remember me?" Harry asked. Ulrich blinked.

"Should I?" he asked.

"Never mind," Harry said quickly. The dead probably couldn't form new memories the same way the living did. But then how did Ulrich know his name? For that matter, how did Ulrich understand him? "We're speaking English right now."

"You're speaking English," Ulrich agreed, shrugging. "I'm not speaking at all."

That was true, Harry realised suddenly. There was no sound coming from the mirror. Why would there be? It wasn't enchanted to speak. He was reminded immediately of Parseltongue. But Ulrich wouldn't know anything about that.

"Why did you conjure me?" Ulrich asked.

"Oh. I was practising," Harry said, holding up the resurrection stone. "Master Joachim just started me on conjuration."

"I see. He's gone and replaced me, then?" Ulrich muttered. Harry blinked, half-remembering that Ulrich had said much the same thing the last time he'd been conjured.

"You're looking at me like we've had this conversation before," Ulrich said, his lip quirking, though his eyes remained cold. Dead. "How many years has it been since I died?"

"I don't know," Harry said, a trickle of discomfort pooling in his stomach as he realised there was so much about Petri's past that he had no idea about. How long had he been at this, trying and failing to pass on his craft?

"It doesn't matter," Ulrich murmured. "Time is difficult, anyway. If you don't need me for something, will you let me go?"

"What, do you have somewhere to be?" Harry asked incredulously. He had just succeeded in his first conjuration, and wanted to have some time to savour the result.

"It hurts to be like this," Ulrich said, looking down as if he had admitted something shameful.

Harry bit his lip. "Oh. Sorry. I didn't realise. Did I mess something up?"

"No," Ulrich said immediately, smirking. "Relax, I was just joking. The only thing that hurts is how clueless you are."

"That's not funny," Harry muttered. He was already uncertain enough without getting deliberately misled.

"You're no fun. I can't believe the master replaced me with a dead serious twerp. How old are you, anyway?"

"Twelve," Harry said.

"The stodgy genius type, I see," Ulrich mused, tapping his chin. "So I'm guessing you don't want to hear juicy secrets about the master?"

"What? Of course I do," Harry said, sitting up straighter. He suddenly realised that this was his opportunity to properly use necromancy for what it was meant for—getting information from the dead.

"He's not standing right behind you or anything, is he?" Ulrich asked, and even though Harry was fairly certain that the answer was 'no', he still glanced behind him guiltily.

"No," he confirmed, turning back in anticipation. "So spill."

Ulrich snickered. "What do you want to know?"

Recalling the conversation from a few minutes ago, Harry eagerly asked, "Can you tell me about Rosenkol? Do you know how the master got him?"

"The secrets of the dead are open to you, and you ask about a house-elf?" Ulrich demanded, rolling his eyes. "You're weird, kid. But yes, I do know. Back during the war, the master was pretty high up in Grindelwald's ranks, one of his acolytes. Rumour has it that he got that position because of how he turned the Eberstadt heir to Grindelwald's cause."

"Who?" Harry asked.

"Eberstadt, you know, one of the oldest families in Switzerland? No? Well anyway, Rosenkol used to belong to Eberstadt, and when he died, Master Joachim got him since they were close. And probably since he's defective, in case you haven't noticed. Ran away from the main family and was just out there, doing who knows what, after killing Eberstadt's father. To be honest, he's always creeped me out. I don't know how the master can stand to keep a wizard killer near him," Ulrich said, shuddering.

"He had his reasons," Harry protested.

"Did you know he taught the elf to conjure?" Ulrich asked.

"Yeah," Harry said after a beat, wondering if he ought to reveal that it was Rosenkol who had conjured Ulrich for him the first time.

"That's perverse, isn't it?" Ulrich demanded. "He treats him like a wizard."

Harry shrugged. "Well, his magic is pretty strong."

"It's unnatural, is what it is. How can an elf with no house, who never does any chores, have that kind of power? That's not how they're supposed to work," Ulrich complained.

Harry thought that maybe Petri had the right of it, and most wizards just had an inaccurate view of house-elves because they regarded them as inferiors. Ulrich was dead, though, so there was no point in trying to argue with him or change his mind. Instead, he asked, "So what was the juicy secret that you wanted to tell me in the first place?"

"Hm, well, depends on what you know already. Did you know that Master Joachim knows how you're going to die?" Ulrich asked.

"Yeah," Harry said, unimpressed. "I know how I'm going to die too."

Something flashed in Ulrich's eyes. "Killed by the Dark Lord. How does that make you feel?"

"How did you know that?" Harry demanded. Ulrich grinned.

"I'm dead, remember? It's my business to know that kind of thing. So how does it make you feel? Are you scared?"

Harry wasn't scared. He was angry. He glared into the glass, raising his wand to—what, cancel the conjuration? He didn't know how, he realised, and didn't want to embarrass himself trying _finite incantatem_. It wouldn't work, anyway, he figured a moment later, because a conjuration wasn't an ongoing spell.

Ulrich was still talking, had even sped up a bit, probably because he knew he was testing Harry's patience. "I know I would've been. I mean, if I had known that Master Joachim would kill me, with no context, that would've changed everything. Do you think it would have happened the same way? Probably not. I probably would've died even earlier. That's what happens when you try to run away from fate."

"What are you trying to tell me?" Harry demanded, narrowing his eyes.

Ulrich stared back slyly. "You want to hear more? Okay, how's this? The Dark Lord kills you and you don't even fight back."

Harry gripped the edge of the mirror so hard that it hurt. "What? I thought it was a duel."

"Hm," Ulrich said, furrowing his brow. "You're not wrong. It's a duel. Actually, no, maybe you kill yourself."

"Excuse me?" Harry set the mirror back down. "Is this another joke?"

"No, it's not. I wouldn't—I can't joke about this. It's just a bit unclear, okay? That happens sometimes," Ulrich murmured, holding up both hands as if to proclaim his innocence.

Harry didn't believe him at all. He didn't think Ulrich could be lying outright, but there was definitely a tinge of malevolence behind the words he spoke, some unseen, malicious agenda.

"You're not Ulrich, are you?" he said in sudden realisation. "Did I—no. I didn't do something wrong. This is just how it is. You're not really Ulrich, because it's not actually possible to bring back the dead, not even in spirit."

"What are you talking about? Of course I'm Ulrich," said the boy in the mirror, sniffing in affront.

"How did you know my name?" Harry asked.

"You're well-known. You've got the lightning-bolt scar," Ulrich said, and he wasn't lying, of course, but Harry could see though him now.

"You died before I was born," Harry said. He didn't know, but he thought it was a good bluff, and Ulrich looked taken aback.

"Yes," he admitted. "But I'm dead. I'm allowed to know things."

Harry considered this in sullen silence for a few moments. It didn't matter if this was Ulrich. Harry had never known Ulrich, not least because, as they had just discussed, Ulrich had died before Harry had even been born. Was it even the same Ulrich as the one Rosenkol had conjured, or the one Petri had placed into the inferius body? Maybe. There had been something mean and dangerous about that one, too.

"If you know things," Harry began, mind racing through all the forbidden things he might like to know, "Can you tell me about this hand? The thief's curse. Is there a way to…" He trailed off, considering that voicing any serious intent to remove or subvert the hand might well count as a traitorous act.

Ulrich laughed. "I don't know just anything. Only things that are the business of the dead."

"Like souls?" Harry tried.

"What about souls?" Ulrich asked. "Master Joachim could tell you about those. Except he really hates the word, and you know, I don't blame him. It's a slippery one."

"Can you tell me about horcruxes?" Harry asked, taking another glance over his shoulder in case Petri had silently returned. He hadn't.

"They're evil. You don't want one," Ulrich said immediately.

Harry narrowed his eyes. "Evil? What's that supposed mean?"

"No good? Very bad? What do you think evil means?" Ulrich asked, raising his eyebrows.

"But why? How?" Harry pressed.

"You have to kill someone to make one, but more importantly, they don't work," Ulrich said, lowering his voice as if he were imparting a grave secret. "The more you try to evade death, the closer you bind yourself to it. Death doesn't like cheaters, and everybody dies in the end."

That did rather sound like the moral of the fairy tale that Luna had sent him, but Harry failed to see how it had to be true in principle. "How do they not work? Actually, first, how _do_ they work? How do they keep you from dying?"

"Well, as long as part of you is still alive, then you're still alive. By definition, so to speak," Ulrich said.

"That's not cryptic at all," Harry muttered. Ulrich shrugged.

"I don't know the details. Asking a dead man how to evade death is clearly unproductive, don't you think?" he said.

"Fine. Who should I ask, then? Master Joachim doesn't want me to know," Harry muttered.

"Clever of him," Ulrich said unhelpfully.

Harry sighed. "Right. Listen. He forced me to make a horcrux and then memory charmed me so I didn't remember it. I just want to know what happened."

"Oh. Hm," Ulrich murmured. He stared glassily at Harry for a few moments before saying, "That tracks."

"It does?"

"Explains why your fate is all…" Ulrich reached out and swiped his hand across the glass, "…scattered. Maybe. So, I take it that you don't want to have a horcrux?"

Harry swallowed, suddenly uncertain. Was that true? Would he rather not have the horcrux?

"I don't know," he said honestly. "I don't think I have enough information."

"If you want me to tell you more, you must promise that you'll destroy your horcrux if you are ever in a position to do so," Ulrich said.

Harry squinted into the mirror, and Ulrich's impassive face stared back. "I thought you said you didn't know the details." And Harry was pretty sure the dead couldn't lie.

"I don't, but I know where you can find the information you want," Ulrich clarified.

What was it that Petri had said? The dead didn't give out just any information. They said the things that were most likely to drive you to join them. Destroying his own horcrux did sound rather like a form of suicide, or at least self-harm.

"No deal, sorry," Harry said. "Why don't you just tell me, and if you're right about me not wanting to have one, I'll decide to destroy it anyway?"

"Hm," Ulrich said, tapping his chin. "No. No deal." He smirked.

Harry scowled. "Fine. I suppose we're done here, then."

"The original offer is still open," Ulrich said, glancing up coyly.

Harry ignored him, waiting to see if the conjuration might disperse on its own. No such luck. After a few moments of awkward silence, he tipped the mirror over and smashed his silver fist into it, shattering Ulrich's smug face with petty satisfaction.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is Sanguini actually an immortalized Coppelius from Der Sandmann? Maybe.


	56. Puppet

Harry had repaired the mirror and tried conjuring Ulrich again, before proceeding to repeat their conversation almost word for word until the eeriness of it unsettled him enough to end it early. That was confirmation, he supposed, that Ulrich did not remember anything from previous conjurations by default. Assured that his illicit questions about horcruxes would remain undiscovered, he went to report his success to Petri, who had seemed genuinely impressed.

"There are several directions we can proceed in from here," Petri told him. "You could work on conjuration without a mirror, in preparation for binding spirits to bodies. Alternatively you could take a step back and attempt a conjuration from scratch, perhaps learn to create your own resurrection stone."

"I think I'd like to do that. Conjure from scratch, I mean," Harry said, unable to help his mind from jumping immediately to his parents.

"It may be difficult, as one normally starts with a close friend or family member. I don't believe you've lost anyone you knew well, have you?" Petri asked.

"I suppose not," Harry said. As depressing as it was, he knew very little about his parents. Percy's death was still on his mind, but he hadn't truly known the older boy either. They had spoken a handful of times at charms club, at best. "Why is it important that I knew the person well? Shouldn't it be enough just to be able to identify them?"

"Theoretically, yes," Petri agreed. "In practice, it takes much more preparation to safely and successfully conjure a stranger."

"So, what would I do if I, in theory, wanted to conjure my classmate, but I didn't know him that well?" Harry asked.

Petri sighed. "Do not try to conjure your classmate. You won't learn anything useful, and you might hurt yourself."

"How do you know that?" Harry asked.

"I've mentioned before, I hope, that conjuration isn't necromancy. Conjurations certainly can be and are used for necromancy, but it's more than a matter of simply asking questions. Directly questioning the dead won't get you very far," Petri said.

Harry frowned, wondering if he should mention his conversation with Ulrich at all. He decided that he was too curious to risk missing the opportunity. "I did learn some actual information from Ulrich, though. I asked him about Rosenkol and he mentioned someone named Eberstadt."

He readied himself for a possible curse, but Petri didn't seem particularly ruffled by this admission. He nodded. "Octavian Eberstadt, yes. He was the friend I mentioned inheriting Rosenkol from. I suppose if you're asking after mundane facts, you might find satisfactory answers. However, if you want to divine anything important, the dead will either refuse to answer or provide dangerously misleading information."

"Misleading, how? They can't lie, right?" Harry asked, even though he had a feeling he knew exactly what Petri meant.

"There's quite a difference between not lying and telling a useful truth. Make no mistake: the dead want you to join them. It's the only thing they're truly capable of desiring. When we conjure specific people, we're metaphorically locking a part of death itself into a bounded form. We use the character of that person and our own will not to be lied to as safety rails, rules that we can trust. You understand, then, why it's safest to conjure a loved one," Petri explained.

"So it's not really them," Harry said, though he already knew, had already seen for himself the strangeness in Ulrich. Perhaps it wasn't right to say that it hadn't been Ulrich, but rather that it had been Ulrich and something more.

Petri waved his hand in an ambivalent gesture. "It is, in the sense that it's the best approximation of their personality, memories, and even sense of self that can still be recovered after death. But it also isn't, because you're pulling them fully formed out of the aether. They're out of context and have no continuity. Every part of them is arbitrary, able to manipulated with spellwork. Whether that really is the same person as the one who once lived… I don't think that's a question with a determinate answer."

After this unsatisfying conversation, Petri steered them back towards more practical matters, namely the fact that Harry had all of two days before term started up again, which wasn't going to be enough time to try anything new on the conjuration front. He also had unfinished homework, which had fallen to the wayside in the face of graver concerns, like having his arm chopped off, so they finally decided that Harry would postpone actual conjuration for now, and instead work on preparing his very own resurrection stones while at Hogwarts.

"Since they've installed dementors there, you might as well get something positive out of the experience," was Petri's logic.

The process Petri described seemed to match what Harry remembered from his library book, except that the stone apparently did not actually have to be a river stone. Ulrich's stone was obsidian, for example. Petri gave Harry a bag of glass marbles, which he suspected were actually Gobstones that were yet to be filled with disgusting liquid. All he had to do was have a dementor eat them, meet with it to cast the same spell every night for a month, and then convince it to regurgitate them back out at the end. In principle, simple, but in reality Harry had no idea how he was going to accomplish any of these three things, especially while evading curfew and possibly going into the Forbidden Forest. At least he still had _Deepeste Risinges_ checked out.

The next two days passed uneventfully, though Harry did manage to make some headway into writing legibly with his left hand, figuring that improved motor control would help with his spellwork. It had been a mistake to leave all his homework until the end, even if it mostly hadn't been his fault. He was already sick of essays and term hadn't even started.

On the appointed day, Lupin escorted them back to the train station, though Harry didn't see the point, given that the Dark Lord seemed to have already played his hand. In any case, nobody attacked them, and they arrived ridiculously early, almost two hours before the train was due to leave. The platform was, understandably, empty, though the Hogwarts Express had at least already arrived. Harry boarded somewhere in the middle and chose a compartment at random.

With time to kill and no books besides his textbooks in his trunk, Harry elected to take a nap, still not fully used to a diurnal schedule.

He was woken up by the shrill whistle that announced the train's departure. Blinking blearily, he tried to rub the stiffness out of his neck and jumped as he realised that there was a person across from him.

"Merlin, Neville, you scared me," he muttered, rubbing at his chest. Neville shrugged.

"Sorry. I've been here awhile," he said. "I saw you there and let myself in, but I didn't want to wake you. Hope you don't mind me being here."

"Of course not. It's good to see you. How was your holiday?" Harry asked.

"All right," Neville said, shrugging again. "You—you're all right? It's just, you didn't write me back so I wasn't sure. Not that you needed to write me back, I mean, it's only been a few days…" He chuckled nervously as Harry straightened up.

"Oh! Sorry. I've been busy. Homework. I sort of left it until the last minute. Thank you for the pounce pot, and the rue," Harry blurted hastily. He stuck out his tongue and pointed at it. "I'm using it."

Neville smiled more brightly. "Oh, great. I hope it works. I mean, I hope we don't have to find out if it works." His face fell again.

"Me too," Harry agreed. Seeing that Neville was very obviously trying not to look at his silver hand, he decided to breach the subject first. "So are you all right? I mean, we met at the hospital. You didn't get hurt too, did you?"

"No, nothing like that," Neville said. He hesitated for a moment. "I was just visiting my parents."

Harry blinked at him in astonishment, having assumed that Neville's parents were dead like his own. Seeing his confusion, Neville shrank in on himself. After a moment, he elaborated in a very small voice, "They live in St Mungo's, in the long-term spell damage ward. They were cursed when I was a baby. With the torture curse."

"The cruciatus curse?" Harry asked, flummoxed when Neville nodded. Spell damage? He'd thought that the cruciatus was specifically designed not to cause any physical harm, probably so that it could be used as a safe punishment. Still, he wasn't insensitive enough to ask. Instead, he said, "That's awful. I'm sorry."

Neville sighed. "There's nothing anyone can do about it. Gran says the healers have tried everything. It was all right before. I mean, I never knew them any other way. But then the people who did that to them escaped from Azkaban and I just—" His hands clenched into fists. "It makes me so angry, but I know I couldn't do anything if I met one of them. I'd just—I'd just go the same way as my parents, probably. I feel like a coward."

"You're not," Harry said emphatically. "It's not cowardly to not do something stupid. If you're ever going to do anything to fix things, you have to be alive, right? So that means staying safe. And your parents—they're still alive, so maybe one day there will be a way to heal them. You could study healing, even, try to do it yourself."

"You're right. Thanks," Neville said with a melancholy smile. "I'm sorry. Here I am, complaining, but at least I get to see my parents. You don't even have that."

Harry shook his head. "No, don't say that. I don't think either of us has it better or worse." His parents might dead, but at least he was on the path to getting them back. Even if he couldn't resurrect them, conjuration was something. What he wanted, he knew, wasn't really for James and Lily Potter to be alive again for their own sakes. What he wanted was entirely selfish—to have parents who could love him and care for him.

"Well… I think you still win at having the worst life. Your hand," Neville pointed out.

"Oh, yeah," Harry said. He explained to Neville what had happened, leaving out the part with the Dark Lord.

"I suppose the article in the paper said as much. But you really think it was an accident?" Neville asked. Harry wasn't sure what to say to that, and Neville continued: "It's just, I've been thinking. At Halloween, when the ceiling collapsed on us, the only person who definitely knew where we were was Vince. I'm not saying he meant to hurt you like that, but you know how Vince has a bit of a weird sense of humour? And he doesn't exactly come from a normal family. Sorry, I know it sounds bad."

As Neville tried his best to retract his head into the neck of his robes, Harry felt it wouldn't be right to lie to him, not when he had only connected the dots that had been laid out so clearly.

"Yeah," Harry murmured. "You're right. It was him, and it wasn't an accident. But I don't think it was his fault, because I think someone made him do it. You said it yourself. His family isn't normal."

"You think it was his dad?" Neville asked. He frowned. "Yeah, that makes sense. But I still can't believe he would go along with it. You could've died—no, Merlin, you were supposed to have died, weren't you? I don't understand. I'm terrified of my Gran, but if she told me to, like, assassinate you, I'd—I dunno, I'd run away from home! I wouldn't go and try to do it. Not that she would ever tell me anything like that."

Harry felt an unbidden surge of warmth. "Thanks Neville. That means a lot to me."

Neville shot him an incredulous look. "We're friends. That's the bare minimum, isn't it? You don't hurt your friends."

"Yeah." A bitter smile tugged at Harry's lips. Neville obviously hadn't encountered the Dark Lord's definition of friendship before.

"We're not really safe at Hogwarts, are we, if things like that can happen, and people can get away with it?" Neville murmured, looking up searchingly. "They could keep happening. You know, Gran said that there are rumours that You-Know-Who is back."

Harry stared at his shoes. He'd met Lord Voldemort, spoken to him at length, been possessed and tortured by him, and still, only now, did it really hit him that people were terrified of the Dark Lord. Of course he had known it before; he was scared of the Dark Lord, and so was Petri, and so was Silviu, but all that was informed fear of the man himself. The shaking in Neville's voice, even when he whispered the name that people used because they were too scared to say Voldemort, was fear before an unstoppable natural disaster.

Choked with the press of terrible knowledge, Harry breathed out a small sigh. "He is."

He felt infinitely lighter to have said it, and yet simultaneously cursed himself as Neville's eyes bugged out. "What? You think it's true, then?"

Harry took a deep breath. He couldn't explain everything. He couldn't in good conscience get Neville involved in whatever horrible plans the Dark Lord had made. Still, there was more than enough evidence out there, and Neville didn't deserve to be lied to, either. "Think about it," he said slowly. "All those Death Eaters broke out of prison at the same time. It's surrounded by soul- and magic-sucking dementors in the middle of the ocean. There's no way they got out on their own. So someone had to break them out, didn't they?"

"It could've been an inside job. Maybe a spy who used to support You-Know-Who," Neville said, though he didn't sound like he believed his own theory at all. Harry shrugged, and Neville sighed. "You're right. You-Know-Who's back, has been back for a while now. That's the best explanation, isn't it? But then, why hasn't he done anything? Gran's told me stories, you know, of how it was back then. People d-dying left and right. Can't trust your own family because they could be im-imposters or mind-controlled."

All the colour drained from Neville's face at his own words, and he hugged himself around the middle.

"Well, if he just stuck to mind-control, then nobody would know, would they?" Harry pointed out, feeling like it was the least he could do when Neville himself had brought up the possibility. And really, who knew how many people were under the imperius curse by now? From his own experience casting it, he thought it would be pretty difficult to actively manage more than one person at a time. But to just keep people controlled under simple, long-term orders? There seemed to be no limit to that. The thought made him a little ill.

And he himself was still under the curse. He couldn't forget it. Even if it probably had very little power over him now, he hadn't seen the Dark Lord deliberately release him from it, so that meant it was still there, lying in wait, ready to subtly nudge him when he let down his guard.

He shuddered as a chilling thought occurred to him: perhaps there was nobody who had met the Dark Lord personally who was not under his imperius curse. Why should he leave loyalty up to trust? He wouldn't. Harry had been in the Dark Lord's head. The man did not trust. The imperius curse was hardly infallible, but it was insurance.

"Do you think Vince was being mind-controlled?" Neville asked.

Harry pressed his lips together grimly. "It's possible. Then it really wouldn't have been his fault."

"That's awful." Neville drew his legs onto the seat and hugged them miserably.

Just then, there was a knock on the window, and Harry spotted Hannah's face hovering outside. He waved her in.

"Hi Harry, Neville. Thought I'd sit with you since we haven't properly talked in a while," she said, flopping down next to Neville. Her eyebrows rose as she took in their sombre expressions, and her gaze slid down to Harry's hand, which was resting on his seat. "What's up with your hand?"

"You didn't read it in the _Prophet_?" Neville asked her.

Hannah tilted her head. "What? No. We don't get the paper at home. My dad says it's all rubbish."

Neville shrugged. "That's fair. It sort of is, most of the time."

"So what happened?" Hannah pressed.

Harry told the story, including the part where they strongly suspected that Vince had been complicit, either because of family pressure or the imperius curse. By the end of it, Hannah's mood looked to have sunk to their level.

"I can't believe it. The next time I see him, I'm going to hex some sense into him," she muttered. "That's not nearly enough, but I don't even know what else there is to do. You can't die, Harry. I'll be horribly sad. I—Merlin, you're alive, and I'm glad, but you could've died. Again."

She shoved her face into the floppy sleeve of her jumper, scrubbing violently at her eyes.

"Sorry," Harry said awkwardly.

"No. Vince is the only one who should be sorry," she said. "He's going to get away with it, isn't he?"

"He already has," said Harry.

Hannah shivered. "That's scary."

"I think you two are safe, if you don't hang around me," Harry said, the thought occurring to him that neither of his friends deserved to be in his blast radius. He had already endangered them once. "A lot of people want to kill me, but probably not you, so maybe it would be better if we don't meet up too often."

"Harry James Potter, you utter numpty," Hannah cried, pointing a sharp finger at him. "You do not get to tell us to stay away for our own good like some daft fairy-tale hero."

"Friends stick together," Neville echoed.

"Haven't you heard of the power of friendship?" Hannah demanded.

Harry stared at her, nonplussed. "Dumbledore might have mentioned that, I think?"

She stared back with an equally bewildered look, and then burst into hysterical laughter. "What? What do you mean, Dumbledore? I'm talking about in books and comics. The hero always saves the day with friends, not alone. Two heads are better than one, that sort of thing. Merlin, I'm such a Hufflepuff, aren't I?"

"You really are," Harry agreed, smiling now. "I don't know, though. I've never really read books for fun. Like fiction."

"Seriously? Actually, that explains a lot," Hannah said after a beat. "You're missing out. The Hogwarts library has practically every novel ever written by a witch or wizard, you know? You should have a look. And I've got some muggle books, too, that used to belong to my mum."

"You should read the classics, at least. _Phantasmagoria of Atlantica_ is great," Neville suggested.

"What's it about?" Harry asked, trying to mask the fact that he had no idea what the words in the title meant.

Neville slid forward in his seat, eager to explain. "It's about these wizards who want to move the continents to unlock ancient magic. It's mad—they're trying to build this huge device, and they need ingredients from all around the world. Actually I suppose those guys are the villains, and the hero is trying to stop them from, you know, destroying civilisation."

"You're not explaining it right," Hannah protested. "So the hero is this super skilled geomancer, and the book starts off with him predicting this horrible calamity after a meteor hits his village."

"Geomancy is like, divination with rocks?" Harry asked.

Hannah nodded. "Yeah. Like he looks at this mountain through his geomancer focus, and bam, he can see the future of the land."

"It's not real." Neville added. "At least, not the way it is in the book." Harry shot him a thankful smile. The last thing he wanted was to start confusing fake magic with real magic.

Neville and Hannah spent the rest of the train ride enthusiastically enumerating all the fiction that Harry had to read. Hannah recommended _The Warlock's Bride_ and _King of_ _the_ _Goblins,_ both adaptations of real historical events ("Leagues better than Binns"). Neville had then jokingly brought up the Harry Potter adventure books, and a sputtering Hannah had been pressed into admitting that she had read them all.

"The real thing doesn't live up to the hype," she remarked haughtily, before breaking down into giggles as Harry affected offense.

They went uninterrupted except by the trolley lady. By the time the train pulled into Hogsmeade Station, Harry had been assigned a dozen books and two comics to explore. At the station, Hannah split off from them to join her Hufflepuff mates in a carriage. Harry drew his cloak more tightly around him as he searched the crowd for his other friends, half hoping and half dreading to find Vince.

But he wasn't there, nor was he at the feast. Harry's heart sank when his gaze swept over Draco and Goyle at the Slytherin table, looking lopsided without their other bookend. Had something happened to him? Harry was distracted from his brooding by the appearance of the food and the tangibly furtive glances of his housemates, who were uncomfortably distant and uncomfortably attentive at the same time. He tried to enjoy the delicious Hogwarts fare and ignore the prickling sense of being watched.

When he finally climbed up his dormitory, ready to pass out, Harry discovered a note on his pillow from Dumbledore, asking to meet at eight in the morning the next day. Unbidden, dread crested over him like a wave. It was such short notice compared to their previous meetings that he couldn't imagine the reason being anything good.

Climbing into his overly-comfortable bed, he stared sleeplessly into the dark canopy. Perhaps Dumbledore had learned what the Dark Lord had been doing in China, and was eager to share, or maybe he had caught the culprit behind the cursed book and Percy's death. But the former hardly seemed like it merited such urgency, while the latter wasn't really Harry's business, even if he had been the one to report the book.

Indeed, the actual topic turned out to be neither of these things.

"Hello, Harry," said Professor Dumbledore as Harry stepped into his office the next morning, biting back a yawn. This time, the headmaster's desk was clear of stray papers, and he sat behind it with a certain austere solemnity. Harry gathered that this was to be no idle chat.

"Professor Dumbledore," Harry greeted, taking a cautious seat. Behind him, Dumbledore's phoenix crooned, filling him with an enervating rush of heat that called for him to curl up and go back to sleep. He blinked away the breathless feeling with a frown.

"Harry, I'm sorry for calling you here so early. I wanted to make sure to speak to you before your lessons started. But first, tea?" said Dumbledore. A tea set materialised right on cue with a slight clatter, accompanied by a platter of crumpets and pastries. Harry spied a familiar black pitcher and inspected its contents suspiciously. Blood, again. Deciding that there was nothing to be ashamed of as Dumbledore dropped sugar cube after sugar cube into his cup, Harry poured a generous amount of blood into his tea. One sip and he felt wide awake. He buttered himself a crumpet, feeling self-conscious as Dumbledore's glittering gaze lingered on his silver hand.

"I see that Joachim's reports have not been exaggerated," Dumbledore said, nibbling at a scone. There was a sorrowful weight in the lines of his face. His beard drooped. "I must apologise again, Harry, for failing you. The thief's curse is a true atrocity. Once more, Lord Voldemort proves that his cruelty knows no bounds."

"I'm not sure I understand, sir," Harry said. "I mean, it's obviously bad that Voldemort can just control my hand, but I didn't think it was well, _that_ bad."

The Dark Lord had the ability to possess his entire body at will, after all. The matter of the hand was almost redundant.

Dumbledore shook his head. "The effect of the curse goes far beyond mere direct control. That hand is a violation of your soul, Harry, a forced alteration on your very being. Dark magic leaves terrible scars when it is used to destroy, but the results are even more fearsome when it is used to create. Part of your soul now supervenes on—that is, it depends upon and results from—Voldemort's will."

The quickening of Harry's heartbeat still felt more like guilt than horror. He understood enough to know that he'd done the same to Silviu before. An atrocity. "Sorry, sir, if I'm being obtuse, but I still don't get exactly how that's bad in and of itself."

Dumbledore turned his head slightly. The morning light glanced off his spectacles, obscuring his eyes. He took a sip of his tea. "It is our choices, Harry, that make us who we are, and Voldemort has just taken away some of your ability to choose—a piece of your free will. That hand serves him, not you, and if you allow it, it will slowly insinuate itself into your being until you serve him as well."

This pronouncement hung heavily in the air for a moment. Dumbledore continued: "Still, one choice remains open to you. There is yet hope that you can reject his influence on you by refusing to acknowledge it as part of yourself. Treat his hand as if it were not there. Avoid using it, and above all, do not cast any magic with it. I know that it is a great deal to ask, Harry, and I would not ask were there any other way."

The food turned to ash in Harry's mouth. He washed it down with a metallic swig of tea, which he had automatically picked up with his right hand. Slowly, he put it back down and pulled his hand back under the edge of the desk.

"I already have, though," he said faintly. "Cast magic with it." Admitting to underage magic in front of the headmaster seemed like the least of his worries at this point.

Dumbledore nodded. "I was afraid that might be the case, but it isn't too late to stop. The soul is resilient, Harry, and I have confidence that you will recover fully if you abstain from now on."

"I suppose I was planning on learning to do magic with my left hand anyway," Harry said, trying to ignore the tightening of his shoulders and the rushing feeling in his ears. He forced himself to continue speaking. "I don't want to be defenceless if Voldemort can just stop me from casting with my right hand whenever he wants."

Dumbledore's eyes pierced right through him. "Promise me, Harry," he entreated in a low voice, "Promise me that you will not cast another spell with Voldemort's hand. Believe me when I tell you that the price is not one that you wish to pay."

Harry opened his mouth. The words caught in his throat. He couldn't. Why couldn't he? "I'll try my best, sir," he choked out hoarsely. Dumbledore's eyes dimmed, and Harry felt a visceral, twisting shame.

"I shall hold you to that," said Professor Dumbledore. They sat in tense silence for a long minute, doubt and indignation clashing in Harry's chest. For a moment, he wished he could have even a portion of Lord Voldemort's steely self-assurance, and that desire only caused more shame to pool inside him.

"Was there anything else, sir?" Harry finally managed to ask, when it became apparent that Dumbledore was content to just sit there.

The headmaster shook his head. "No, Harry, that was all. I'm sorry."

Harry nodded jerkily, getting to his feet. "It's not your fault, sir. Thanks for the tea."

He stumbled almost blindly out of the office, wandering down the stairs in a bid to get outside, somewhere with fresh air. He felt like he couldn't breathe. Outside was where he was supposed to be, anyway; the first lesson of the day was Herbology with the Slytherins. Harry arrived at Greenhouse Three absurdly early and found Professor Sprout still setting up for the lesson.

"Mr Potter," she greeted warmly, eyes crinkled in sympathy. She glanced only briefly to his hand, passing him a tray of seed packets. "Would you be a dear and put two of these at each station?"

Harry smiled at her, grateful that she wasn't about to treat him like an invalid. He took the tray, grimacing as he considered what Dumbledore had said. What counted as 'using' his right hand? He thought it would be absurd to pretend as if all he had were a stump, but at the same time he definitely didn't want to be twisted into Lord Voldemort's puppet—it was almost laughable, given how much control Voldemort had over him already, how he acquiesced to the Dark Lord's every demand, but at least in his heart he could hate that control, wish for it to be gone. That meant that he was still himself, right? The hand hadn't won yet. With a sigh, he balanced the tray on his elbow and set to work.

Other students soon began trickling in. Harry twitched with nervous tension as he surveyed each new arrival, wondering how he was supposed to react to seeing Vince, whether Vince would even show up. There wasn't a good reason for his absence. Yaxley, who had been put in charge of the investigation, had done a spectacular cover-up job for Crabbe Sr, and the whole thing had been ruled a tragic accident and played up by the _Daily Prophet._ Harry didn't know what to expect, but he was dying to understand exactly how complicit Vince had been.

"We've got some already, Potter," said Zabini when he tried to put down more seed packets, and Harry looked up to discover that he was indeed accidentally making a second round. Setting the tray aside, he hurried to an unclaimed workstation on the side with more Ravenclaws, still keeping his eye on the entrance.

No Vince. His eyes did a panicked circuit of the greenhouse, wondering if he'd perhaps missed something, but no, there were Draco and Goyle with no third member of their gang. Making a decision, Harry sidled around the perimeter, taking care not to brush any of the creeping vines curling from the walls, and wedged himself in next to Goyle.

"Hey," the large boy grunted.

"Hey," said Harry.

"Hello Harry," said Draco, giving him a considering look. He held out his hand. Harry blinked at it.

"We've met already, Draco. Loads of times," he said, wondering if the _fidelius_ charm had somehow messed up some people's memories (there'd been no evidence of any such effect with either Hannah or Neville, at least), but Draco stubbornly did not withdraw, so Harry shook his hand anyway, bemused until he saw the silver of his own appendage and realised that Draco had wanted to get a good look at it. That sneaky git! Harry tried not to frown. Had the Dark Lord ordered him to get Harry to use his hand as much as possible? It seemed absurd, but he didn't know what to believe anymore.

"Shaking hands is a perfectly ordinary friendly greeting," Draco said, and Harry had to fight not to roll his eyes.

"For old codgers, maybe," he muttered. "Look, I wanted to ask, have you—"

"I haven't seen Vince," Draco said instantly, "because he's not here. He's at home. I heard his mum's ill."

Harry swore under his breath, instantly recalling the fateful words he'd read with a sting of old regret.

"You should write him," Draco went on, oblivious, "He's been beating himself up about the accident. I told him, 'Harry knows you're thicker than a troll's cudgel. It's a risk of doing business.' Really, I'm just surprised he didn't curse his own hand off first."

Despite the totally insensitive nature of this comment, Harry cracked a weak grin. Draco's blasé rudeness was a relief—his own dormmates had acted like strangers last night, avoiding his gaze and sneaking awkward glances when they thought he wasn't looking. His face fell as he thought back to Vince, his chest clenching painfully.

If tomorrow, Lord Voldemort ordered him to kill Hannah, or Neville, or _Vince_ , would he refuse him? Certainly, he would argue, beg, endure torture, do anything to change the Dark Lord's mind—but if all else failed, _would he refuse?_ Not only refuse to do the deed like a coward, because that would be worth nothing, but work to ensure that it went undone, by anybody?

Harry didn't know, and that put a bitter taste in his mouth. Or perhaps that was just the rue leaf. He sucked on it until his mouth went dry.

"All right everybody, today we'll be planting fanged geraniums," Professor Sprout announced, startling him from his spiralling introspection. "Now, you won't be handling the adult specimens until your fifth year, but the seedlings are entirely harmless. Can anybody tell me an interesting fact about fanged geranium seeds?"

Stephen raised his hand lazily, and Professor Sprout nodded at him.

"The seeds are actually the so-called 'fangs' of the flower, and they're the only magical part of the plant. When they're broken off, they go dormant, but occasionally they can still try to take a nip out of you," he said.

Professor Sprout beamed. "That's exactly right. Five points to Ravenclaw. The seeds we'll be planting today were harvested in the fall, so they should be completely settled by now, but just to be safe, we'll handle them with gloves on. I don't want to see any bloody fingertips today."

Harry supposed that one advantage of having a magical hand was that it couldn't be cut up. In fact, he wasn't sure if this particular specimen could even be damaged. He hadn't dared test it on purpose, in case that was somehow deemed 'disloyal', but it was something he'd been wondering ever since he had put a hole through Eldred's table with his fist.

Anyway, he reminded himself, he ought not to use it now when it was unnecessary. When Professor Sprout motioned for them to get started, he pulled a glove onto his left hand with his teeth and tugged the empty planter at his station towards him.

"Does it hurt?" Draco asked, nodding at his hand.

"No," Harry said. "I just want to get used to doing things with my left hand."

Draco frowned. "Can you still do magic with that?"

"No," Harry said, committing to the lie. Perhaps if everybody thought he simply couldn't use his right hand anymore—and perhaps that was the logical assumption, when all available non-cursed prostheses were poor substitutes at best—then he would have more incentive to keep his word to Dumbledore.

"That's horrible," said Draco, unease flashing across his face for the first time. "Can you… you can still do magic, though, with your other hand?"

"Obviously. I'm here, aren't I?" Harry muttered, offended. He had to take a moment to remind himself that it was just in a Malfoy's nature to be a huge prat.

"Right, of course," Draco said, turning pensively to his seeds. Harry shoved his geranium fangs point-first into the dirt with more force than was perhaps necessary.

He had a free period after Herbology and figured that he had better find an empty study room to work on his left-handed casting before he attended an actual lesson involving wandwork. Still, even as he took out his willow wand and tried to get a comfortable grip, he couldn't help thinking of Vince, trying to imagine how he was doing. Was his mother really ill? Was he trapped at home with his demanding, Death Eater father? Was any or all of their friendship real?

Sighing deeply, he put away his wand and took out a quill and a piece of parchment instead. 'Dear Vince,' he wrote, and stopped. It occurred to him that none of the questions he had were the sort that could really be put to parchment. Even if he did write them down, they might not be questions that Vince could safely answer.

But there was one place to get answers without asking anybody. Harry palmed the box of tarot cards in his pocket. His fingers curled restlessly. It was the cards that had got him into this mess in the first place, sealed Vince's fate of leaving Hogwarts. Or was it? The relationship between divination and possible futures still perplexed him. Something deep within him still cried out in scepticism, refused to believe that just looking could make any difference. They were just cards, in the end. A warning was better than no warning.

He found himself dealing out three cards.

"The Hermit," Harry muttered, staring at the first card and wrinkling his brow as he tried to remember what it meant. It had never come up for him before. "Oh. Right. Treason. Hiding things. Of course. Would've been good to know that beforehand." He flipped the next card. "Five of stars. That's… guilt. Well, good. You'd better be feeling at least a little guilty. Four of wands, reversed. No freedom. Merlin, it's not the imperius curse again, is it?"

Harry shook his head. It was the four of wands, and wands tended to be a literal suit. So Vince would literally not be free, ergo, he must be trapped at home. He _would_ be trapped at home, presumably in the event that he tried to leave. Harry grimaced, feeling terrible. He dipped his quill and set the tip to the parchment.

Then he paused again, groaning and letting his head thunk against the table. 'You should write him,' Draco had said, and Harry had narrowed his focus so hard on this advice that he had forgotten a glaring problem: Vince couldn't read. It was possible that if he wrote something, Vince would understand it anyway through intuition alone, but there was no guarantee there. Harry sighed. Perhaps he could look into letters that could read themselves—he knew they existed, since the Weasley twins used to get screaming letters from their mum on a monthly basis—but he wasn't sure if it was some kind of enchanted parchment or a charm to record a voice.

Still, who knew how long it would take to learn how to enchant a letter? Harry bit his lip, tugging the parchment back towards him. He wrote just three words, trying to pour as much intent as he could into each ragged stroke: 'I forgive you.'

It wasn't that simple at all, but he hoped it would do for now. Maybe Vince deserved to stew in guilt for a few more days, or even forever. But it had felt good to write those words. He didn't want to Vince to be hurt, whether he deserved it or not, because—what was it Neville had said? Friends don't hurt each other. And Harry was still Vince's friend.

He folded up the note and climbed up to the owlry to post it before heading back down to lunch, where he indulged himself in some greasy fish and chips.

"Ginny wants to talk to you," said Luna as she sat down across from him, before proceeding to sandwich chips inside a bread roll.

"Oh." Harry eyed her plate dubiously. "Now? About what?"

"After lunch. Probably about the top secret book," Luna said.

"It's not really a secret anymore, is it? We told the teachers," Harry pointed out.

Luna shrugged. "She said to meet her in the kitchens."

Harry glanced over to the Gryffindor table and was unable to locate Ginny's mop of fiery red hair. She was probably already downstairs. Burning with curiosity, he wolfed down the rest of his food and stared at Luna perhaps a little too impatiently as she cut her creation into fourths and proceeded to eat it daintily with a fork and knife.

"You didn't have to wait for me, you know," Luna said when he sprang out of his seat as soon as she finished. "But thank you."

Harry shrugged. "It would have been rude and weird to go alone. She's your friend."

"You think so?" Luna asked.

Harry wasn't sure how to respond to that, so he mumbled, "You knew each other before Hogwarts, right?"

"I suppose we did," Luna agreed.

As lunch was still going on in the Great Hall, the four long tables in the kitchens were fully set with serving dishes piled high with food. Ginny was sitting off to the side on a stool by the counter, and the house-elves greeted Harry and Luna enthusiastically as they entered.

"Is the food being to Young Master and Misses' satisfaction? If it is not, elves can be making a special order," said the elf who ushered them inside. It was a male elf who introduced himself as Tappy this time, and not Nelly.

"Oh yes, everything was great. We're just here to talk," Harry said, gesturing vaguely at Ginny, who waved at them. She looked tired. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her skin was unhealthily pallid.

"Tea?" she asked as they sat down on either side of her. As she pointed to the teapot, it rose into the air, and two cups soared over their heads just in time to receive the liquid.

"Two sugars, no milk," Luna said, and the tea set obliged.

Harry took his black, not in the mood for any bloody surprises. He glanced expectantly at Ginny.

"I read about what happened in the paper," Ginny said, nodding to Harry's hand—the silver one, which was currently holding his teacup. Guiltily, he set the cup down and spun it around, reminding himself sternly to use his left hand next time. "So I was wondering, how did you prove to the aurors that it was a dark artefact?"

Harry blinked. "I didn't really do anything. My uncle reported it, I think, and he had the artefact, so he probably gave it to them."

"Right, but how did they check that it was cursed? I asked Bill and he said there are spells for seeing how other spells are put together, but they aren't very exact, so you can't know for sure what something's spelled to do until you see it in action," Ginny said.

Thoroughly bemused at this point, Harry said, "Well, it rotted my hand off, so I think that counts as seeing it in action."

Ginny winced. "Sorry, I didn't mean—sorry. Let me start over. My mum said that Professor Dumbledore said that the book I gave Percy wasn't a dark artefact at all. But that has to be wrong, doesn't it? I mean you saw what it was doing to Clearwater. That wasn't a coincidence."

Harry had a horrible moment of realisation. Dumbledore had given the book to Petri, and Petri must have told him that it wasn't cursed, never mind that it was a necromancer's tool.

"What?" Ginny demanded, studying his face.

"He's technically right," Harry said, and at her darkening expression hastily added, "but that doesn't matter! It's still dangerous, for sure, even though it's not cursed. Dumbledore asked my uncle to look into it."

"Your uncle? Not the one who has the shop in Knockturn?" Ginny asked.

"Yeah. That one," Harry confirmed, and Ginny huffed.

"Guess it makes sense that he'd know about shady items. Not to be rude, but you're sure he wasn't lying?"

Harry nodded. "He showed me how it worked. It's for divination. It shows you how you'll die."

Ginny paled even further. "That's awful. How is that not dark?"

"Well, it's not _meant_ to hurt you," Harry said, grimacing. "But yeah, it's not great."

"I don't get it though. Why on earth would Percy have listened to it? If a book told me I was going to top myself, well, first of all I'd think it was a bad prank. I wouldn't go ahead and actually do what it said," Ginny muttered. "And honestly, I'm pretty daft compared to Percy."

"It's… I don't think it's that simple," Harry mumbled, trying to think of some inoffensive way to explain the fateful word effect and the general inevitability of fate. He couldn't, so he picked a different angle: "The book, it makes you write in these confusing riddles. I couldn't even understand mine, other than that it was something bad."

"You wrote in it?" Ginny asked disapprovingly.

Harry shook his head. "No, my uncle wrote in it for me. You can divine for other people too. But what I'm trying to say is that maybe your brother saw something he thought was really terrible, and he wanted to avoid it."

"Why would he believe it? Just because it was in a book?" Luna asked.

"Thank you!" Ginny huffed, throwing her hands up in the air. They paused there, and she frowned. "Actually, maybe you're right. Maybe he knew exactly what it was. It was Percy. He wouldn't have gone along with it without doing his research. We need to get our hands on it. See for ourselves. I can't believe we didn't have a look when we had it."

"Well, we thought it might curse us at the time," Harry pointed out.

"I still think it would be a bad idea to read it," Luna said. "It doesn't matter if it's cursed or not, does it? Reading it still made Percy very sad. And Penelope too."

"Penelope!" Harry exclaimed, slapping the counter. "She's read it. She knows what it said, so we can ask her."

"Genius. This is why I hang around Ravenclaws," Ginny said. Luna made a funny sound that might have been a sigh.

"Why do we want to know what it says again?" Harry asked, drawing a blank as he reviewed the conversation.

"To prove that it really is bad, and someone was trying to kill him, of course," Ginny said. "Or, not him specifically, but somebody. Like what happened to you. It's not like you just found a dark artefact on the ground. Someone sent it by owl post, even if it somehow got to you by accident."

"It wasn't an accident," Harry said emphatically. There was a beat of silence and staring, wherein he decided he didn't want to have that conversation, and quickly returned to the topic at hand. "Didn't you actually just find the book, though?"

"I found it in my _things_ ," Ginny emphasised. "I don't think it was an accident here either. Someone dropped it there on purpose.

For a moment, Harry wondered if this had been another oblique assassination attempt meant for him. There were loads of Death Eaters, after all. Harry remembered seeing dozens at the Dark Lord's resurrection. Vince's father could hardly have been the only one trying to kill him. Still, it seemed too flimsy an attempt, if it was one. The book wasn't even a true dark artefact, and Ginny hadn't even known him last summer when she had first found it.

"I want to find out who put it there and I want to make them pay," Ginny said, some colour finally illuminating her face.

Harry wasn't sure he could relate. He just felt a bad twist in his gut now when he thought about Vince. Lord Voldemort, who probably deserved all his hatred and vindictiveness, elicited instead a bone-deep sense of resignation.

"It might not have been a 'who', but a 'what'," Luna mused. "Remember how nargles moved the book around while we were trying to get our hands on it?"

"Oh yeah, we never did find out how Penelope ended up with it after you had it," Harry told Ginny, frowning.

"If it wasn't a 'who', then that means it was just bad luck. I can't accept that," Ginny said. "That this happened to my brother, my family, for no reason. I don't care. Even if it was something like a nargle, I'm going to find it and catch it."

"I'm in favour," Luna said. "I can ask my daddy for some ways to trap nargles."

Ginny accepted this and looked expectantly at Harry, who belatedly tried to think of something he could contribute.

"Hang on. If you want to know who gave you that book, shouldn't you be thinking about where you were and who was around when you got it?" Harry asked.

"I told you, I found it mixed in with my school books after we went shopping for supplies last summer," Ginny said.

"So it was from Flourish and Blotts?" Harry asked.

"I thought so at first, but that's not necessarily true, right?" Ginny muttered. Harry's brow furrowed as his mind jumped to the last time he was in the bookshop. It stood out clearly, as it had been the day of Lockhart's book signing, when Harry had gone to cast the imperius curse. He had seen the Weasleys there, he remembered, or at least, Ron Weasley.

"Malfoy," he said suddenly, recalling his arranged distraction. "Lucius Malfoy got in a fight with your dad."

"What?" Ginny said, staring at him. "You were there?"

"Yeah. Booklist came that day, last minute, remember?" Harry said, scratching his head nervously.

"Oh, right. I'm not sure what exactly happened," Ginny muttered. "I think there was a lot of smoke? I just remember Mum was so embarrassed, she was scolding Dad the whole rest of the trip, and Fred and George kept trying to act out the fight. I can't remember if I actually saw Malfoy myself, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was him. Dad had to search his house for dark artefacts once, for work."

"So there's a motive, and a method," Harry said, already having mostly convinced himself that it had been Malfoy.

"We've got to prove it, somehow," Ginny said, sighing irritably. "Grown-ups are the worst. They can't see what's right in front of them. 'You're just being silly, Ginny,' is what they'll say unless I make them think of it themselves."

"What do your parents think is going on, then?" Harry asked.

Ginny made another frustrated sound. "Dad was proud of me for finding the book and turning it in to Professor Dumbledore, but Mum thought I was being reckless and she wouldn't listen to me. And now Dumbledore says the book isn't cursed and they just believe him. It's—Mum's been having a really hard time, and…" She swallowed, clearly trying to hold back tears. Harry glanced away awkwardly. Ginny collected herself and continued, "and she thinks it's her fault for putting too many expectations on Percy. But it wasn't, it was somebody evil, like Malfoy, and I need to prove it."

"You want to get Malfoy arrested then? That'll probably be hard," Harry said, thinking of how Yaxley was right there in the Auror Office to hush things up. And even if they put Malfoy in Azkaban, it probably wouldn't stick, given that the Dark Lord had shown himself willing and capable of breaking his servants out. Though Malfoy was probably not in the best standing, Harry knew that the Dark Lord kept him around because he was still useful, even just by dint of being rich and having a nice house.

Ginny shrugged. "Yeah, I know it'll be a long shot. He could just say he accidentally dropped the book, and nobody could prove it was his fault. Maybe it'd be easier to get revenge some other way. You think we could get Malfoy junior to send him a cursed letter? It'd serve him right."

Harry blinked at this blatant statement of dark intent. "It's not the worst idea," he said cautiously. After all, cursed post had worked well enough on him. "But it'd have to activate when read, I think, which could be tricky to work out."

"I was sort of joking," Ginny said after a beat, staring at him and choking out a mirthless laugh. "It wouldn't fix anything. My parents would still—well, I want them to know who they should be blaming. So we still need evidence. I wish Percy had just left a note, an explanation, anything! The one time he doesn't take detailed notes…"

"We can ask Penelope," Harry said. At Ginny's blank look, he added, "I mean, whether Percy left some kind of notes in the book. I'm not sure if you can write in it without actually using it, but it's worth checking, right?"

"All right," Ginny agreed. She gave him a tentative smile. "Thanks, by the way, for helping."

Harry nodded. They separated to go to their lessons then, as the lunch period was nearly over. Harry had been tasked with reaching out to Penelope, since he knew her the best out of all of them. First, however, he had Defence Against the Dark Arts. He wandered into the classroom a few minutes early, intending to claim a nice seat somewhere in the middle of the room. As soon as he stepped inside, however, he was stopped short by Professor Lockhart, who had leapt to his feet and sauntered over to the door.

"Harry! I saw that you made the front page of the _Prophet_ over the holiday. Terrible business. But if you don't mind me being straight with you, a wasted opportunity! Where was the exclusive interview? Your statement of your bravery, at least? You weren't even in your own story, my boy, and that's a mistake," Lockhart told him, closing a clammy hand around his shoulder.

Dumbfounded, Harry let himself be steered into a chair in the front row.

"Fame is a fickle flame, Harry, and you have to seize every chance to stoke it. For a tragic hero like you, the sympathetic angle is perfect. You need be the one to tell the tale, showcase your suffering to the world and capture the bleeding hearts of the public!" Lockhart leaned closer, one hand held to the corner of his mouth secretively. "I'm telling you this, Harry, because I see something of myself in you. I was a young Ravenclaw like you once, aimlessly wandering through life, ignorant of the importance of image. Take it from me—image is everything. Power and smarts don't matter one whit without the right face to back them up."

"Right," Harry said, uncertain how he was supposed to respond to that. Lockhart seemed happy enough to keep talking on his own.

"I want to see you succeed, Harry. What say you I introduce you to some of my journalist friends? We'll get you on the front cover of _Witch Weekly_. You and me, a heartfelt story of loss and recovery. Hogwarts Professor and five-time winner of Witch Weekly's Most Charming Smile Award supports the Boy-Who-Lived through a trying time after his debilitating injury," Lockhart said, throwing his hand out demonstratively towards one of the framed magazine covers on the wall.

Harry was saved from having to formulate a response by a flood of students streaming into the classroom. Professor Lockhart stepped away from the desk quickly and returned to stand behind the lectern, though he shot Harry a roguish wink. Harry felt his ears heat up at the very prospect of appearing in _Witch Weekly_. He was already planning out his escape route for the end of the lesson.

Of course, as if he'd read his mind, Lockhart called Harry up to act as the Wagga Wagga Werewolf for a demonstration of its defeat.

"A truly terrifying howl reached my ears as a ragged shadow crested the hill, its form suddenly revealed in the stark light of the full moon—it was the Wagga Wagga Werewolf," Lockhart narrated.

He cued Harry, who managed a half-hearted, "Woooh," his face burning as he accidentally made eye-contact with Neville, who gave him a watery smile and an unhelpful thumbs up.

"Now, now, Harry, a little more enthusiasm, I think. 'A terrifying howl,' I said," Lockhart instructed, oblivious to his humiliation.

Well, if Lockhart was going to have fun, then why should it be at Harry's expense? He forced down the colour in his cheeks and drew his wand as subtly as he could, for once grateful that he was now forced to be left-handed, as that was the side facing away from the class. He tapped his jaw with a muttered, " _Sonorus_."

Then he sucked in a deep breath and howled. An unearthly wave of sound crashed through the room, rattling the Lockharts in their frames. They ran pell-mell, bumping into each other as they went. The real Lockhart had gone pale and was staring at him, his wand still held loosely in his hand like a conductor's baton.

"That was, erm, very good, yes, very lifelike," he stammered.

Slow clapping started in the back corner of the room. Harry glanced up and saw Terry grinning at him with raised eyebrows. The rest of the class soon joined in on the applause.

"Now, hold on, we're not finished yet," Lockhart said, clearing his throat, to no avail. Everyone continued to clap even as he brandished his wand in a nonsensical fashion, shouting, " _Homorphus!_ "

Harry dove out of the way, just in case some unintended magic actually made its way out of the end of the wand. Fortunately, he needn't have worried. He took a moment to cast the quietening charm on himself and then pretended to miserably turn back into a human. Then, before Lockhart could properly dismiss them, he ran out the door, thankful that he had no rucksack to weigh him down.

"That was brilliant mate," Terry told him when all the second years had returned to the Ravenclaw common room and colonised their own corner. "The look on his face!"

Harry grinned at him, relieved that the weird caution of his dorm mates from last night seemed to be gone.

"Do you think he'll stop doing those daft re-enactments?" Lisa asked from where she was sprawled on a pouffe.

"They're pretty funny," Terry said.

Lisa huffed. "They're an utter waste of time. If he's going to not teach, he should at least have the decency to let us have a free period,"

"Just sit back and appreciate the view," Mandy advised.

"What does that even mean?" Lisa demanded. Mandy and Sue looked at each other and giggled.

Harry supposed Lockhart was nice to look at, sort of like a garishly painted statue, but there was an unflattering, manic glint in his eyes that Harry couldn't help attributing to the imperius curse. It was silly, of course—there were no outward signs of a well-cast imperius—but he imagined that he could still feel an echo of the slippery thread that had once connected them. It tasted of guilt.

The bright side of having Lockhart as their professor was that he rarely assigned homework, and when he did, it was something ridiculous that inevitably ended up becoming creative writing. With only Herbology and Defence on Mondays, they'd managed to get through the entire day without any new assignments. Harry therefore garnered a few odd looks when he excused himself to go to the library.

He couldn't help it; he had extracurricular work to do. For one, he still had no viable plan for getting started on his resurrection stones beyond waltzing into the forest and hoping that the dementors remembered him and didn't want to eat him. He had little confidence that he could replicate the method practised by the Dark Lord, even with the instructions in _Deepeste Risinges_.

There were other ways to protect oneself against dementors, though, like the patronus charm. And since it was a charm, Harry knew just where to look.

As it was early afternoon on the first day of term, the library was fairly deserted, but for a few seventh years probably working on projects or NEWT revision. Harry had unfettered access to the _Complete Compendium,_ which sported an intimidating twelve-page entry on the patronus. He had just settled down to read when a shadow fell over the page. He glanced up.

"Oh, hello, Hermione," he whispered. She sat down in the vacant seat across from him, dropping her heavy rucksack by her feet. "What are you doing here?"

"Looking for something to read, of course, but I was also looking for you," she said.

Harry blinked. "Oh?"

"You're Harry Potter," she said.

"Er, yes," Harry agreed.

Hermione nodded, twirling a lock of hair agitatedly between her fingers. "How come I didn't notice that until last night? I knew, of course, but, well, Colin asked me if I knew you—knew Harry Potter, I mean, and whether I could introduce you, and he's asked me that a dozen times by now, and I've said yes every time but haven't been able to do it until now. It's not that I forgot. I thought about it, and then I couldn't figure out how to do it, like I can't solve a three-way transfiguration array in my head."

Hermione was scarily observant, Harry thought. He supposed there was no harm in telling her the truth. "There was a charm on my name. I cancelled it over the holiday."

"A charm? What kind of charm? To prevent people from recognising you properly, I assume. That's terribly clever! It'd keep you safe from people who resent you, like You-Know-Who's supporters. Why did you—oh, of course. I suppose it wasn't working out." She paused her one-sided conversation and grimaced at his hand. Harry quickly hid it under the table, and she blurted, "Sorry, sorry I didn't mean to—"

Harry shook his head. "Ah, no, we can talk about it, it's just, I'm not supposed to use it," he muttered. Of course, he had accidentally been turning pages with it. Bugger.

Hermione looked like she would love dearly to ask why, but had enough tact to keep silent for once. Instead, she said, "Right, so, would you be all right to meet with Colin? Colin Creevey. He's a Gryffindor in the year below us, and he's… your fan."

"My fan," Harry repeated, a little horrified.

"It's rather endearing, really. I think you should humour him," she said.

"Right. I suppose," Harry said.

"Great. I've got his timetable right here, can you see when would work for you?" she asked. Harry hadn't been expecting anything this formal, and awkwardly brought out a quill to make a squiggly underline for tomorrow evening at four.

"I suppose we can meet in the Great Hall before dinner," Harry suggested, and Hermione agreed to relay his response.

"So, what are you reading?" she asked, predictably. Harry explained about the patronus charm, and Hermione actually started bouncing up and down in excitement. "That's a great idea, with all the dementors floating around. I considered learning it before, only, it's supposed to be really difficult, so I haven't tried it yet. Would you mind terribly if I joined you?"

Harry shrugged, having half expected this outcome. "Sure. Want to start now? I'm free all evening. Haven't got any homework yet."

"Me neither," Hermione said. "We ought to get some supervision if we're trying advanced spells, though. The patronus charm is a defensive spell, right? Do you think Professor Lockhart would agree to help us?"

"Maybe." Professor Lockhart, following the Dark Lord's will, had recommended _Deepeste Risinges_ to him, so it stood to reason that he wasn't interested in preventing Harry from defending himself against dementors. Perhaps he would show some of his hidden competence at magic for a change.

Harry remembered belatedly that he had a reason to not want to see Lockhart—namely, the matter of the _Witch Weekly_ article. He groaned.

"What?" Hermione asked, and Harry explained reluctantly. She furrowed her eyebrows. "Well, he does have a point. You are rather famous, and people like to gossip about celebrities, so you might as well make it good gossip. I've… I've even heard my housemates talk about you before." She reddened slightly, and Harry decided he didn't want to know.

"So you think I should go for it? _Witch Weekly_?" he whispered, glancing around reflexively. He was relieved to find nobody else around.

"Well, I don't know. I'm not exactly experienced with interacting with the press," Hermione said hastily. "And I certainly don't read magazines."

"I'm going to have to see Professor Lockhart in lessons eventually," Harry mused. "All right. If he brings it up again, I'll say yes. And we can go ahead and ask him for help with the patronus charm."

Hermione somehow had the sixth year timetable, with which they determined that Professor Lockhart probably wasn't going to be free until four-thirty, after the last possible lesson of the day.

"Have you got all the years?" Harry couldn't help asking.

Hermione shook her head. "I only have the sixth year one because I was meeting with Penelope to revise last term."

"You were meeting with a sixth year to _revise_?" Harry repeated incredulously. He shook his head as she flushed and stammered excuses. "Never mind, did you say Penelope? I actually need to talk to her. Do you think I could get a copy of that timetable?"

Hermione nodded, and Harry colour-changed a piece of parchment to match. Some of the text came out smudged, but he deemed it sufficient; all he needed to know was when Penelope would be free.

"She hasn't been feeling well lately, though," Hermione cautioned.

Harry nodded vaguely. He had the urge to explain the situation with the book to her, but figured that it was sort of Ginny's and Penelope's private business, so refrained.

"I'll go find more books on the patronus charm," Hermione offered, getting to her feet. By the time Harry finished slogging through the _Compendium_ entry, she had returned with a whole armful, which she spread out on the table. She gestured to a thin volume with a colourfully illustrated jacket. "This one's fiction, but 'patronus' came up quite a few times so I picked it up anyway."

Harry recognised the title: _The Warlock's Bride_. "Hannah told me about this one. It's a modern retelling of this old story about a dark wizard with loads of dementors, and this kid with a mouse patronus that beats him."

"Do you think it's technically accurate?" Hermione asked.

Harry shrugged. "I'll read it. I told Hannah I would, anyway."

The book wasn't very long at all, more of a novella than a proper novel, and Harry got through the whole thing in two hours. By then, Hermione had skimmed over and made copious notes on five different volumes, and Harry felt half guilty, half pleased that he had accidentally outsourced most of the research to her.

"We should head out now if we're going to catch Professor Lockhart," Harry pointed out.

"Oh, all right," she muttered, casting a last longing look at the bulky tome she'd been paging through. "We shouldn't need to check any of these out. I think I took enough notes. How was your story?"

"Pretty interesting. You know how you're supposed to think of a happy memory to cast the charm? Well in the story, Illyius, the hero, doesn't actually think of a memory—he thinks about this girl he likes, the one he's trying to save from the dark wizard. Do you think that would work in real life?" Harry asked.

"Hmm," Hermione murmured. "Maybe they just changed it for the story, to make it seem more romantic. Everything I've read says you need a happy memory."

"Is it the memory that's important, or are you supposed to feel happy?" Harry recalled Professor Dumbledore's mention of emotion leaving traces again. Traces meant that magic was being used, and that meant that emotions could probably influence spells. "Hang on. You don't sacrifice your happy memory, do you?"

Hermione shook her head. "No, I don't think so, based on what I read. I hope not. That would be awful. I suppose we can ask Professor Lockhart about it."

Professor Lockhart was quite cagey about the subject when they did ask, however.

"I'm a very busy man, you know," he said. "You wouldn't believe the amount of fan mail I get. I've got to reply to all of it personally, of course. A little advice for you, Harry. Never leave your fans wanting! The worst thing that could happen to you is to have them turn on you. Take care of your fans, or they'll take care of you! In a bad way."

"Please, sir, we just need a professor's supervision," Hermione begged in her best teacher's pet tone.

"So we don't blow anything up," Harry added, ignoring the glare that Hermione directed his way.

"Hm, well, I suppose," Lockhart murmured. "But I haven't the time to do any demonstrations or that sort of thing."

"Thank you, sir, that's all right. Could you answer a few questions, though, sir?" Hermione pressed.

"Of course. Ask away," Lockhart said, sweeping his hand out magnanimously.

"Right. Does the size of the patronus affect anything? I read that power doesn't have anything to do with the size, but what about the range of protection? The charm creates a sort of aura that stops dementors, right?" Hermione fired off.

"As in all things, the bigger the better, I'd say. But no shame at all in something small. Why, legend has it that Illyius drove off a thousand dementors with a mouse patronus," Professor Lockhart told them, and Harry, hearing the reference to the book he had just read, felt culturally aware for the first time ever.

"Yes, but did he drive them off one by one, or all at once? Was the mouse faster than other animals?" Hermione wanted to know, but Harry already figured it was a lost cause. Lockhart was obviously stalling, so either he didn't know, or he didn't want them to know.

"Let's just try the spell," Harry said. "We can practice in here, right?"

Lockhart agreed, hastily retreating behind his desk, and Harry led Hermione to the far corner of the Defence classroom. She was practically vibrating, with excitement or nervousness, Harry couldn't tell.

"You try first?" he suggested.

"All right," Hermione said, a slight quaver in her voice. She cleared her throat as she took a step forward and held her wand up loosely. "The patronus charm is a work of the entire body. You must stand firm as you turn to face the darkness, drawing upon happy times past. Let that feeling fill your being to the brim and spill forth to call a protector. _Expecto patronum!_ " A pale wisp of silver mist fluttered from the end of her wand, and she let out a heavy breath. "Oh."

"Good job," Harry said, but Hermione still wilted noticeably. "You weren't expecting to get it on the first go, were you? It's supposed to be hard for even grown wizards."

"Right, of course," she agreed. " _Expecto patronum!_ "

This time, nothing happened at all, and she bit her lip.

"You've got to be happy," Harry reminded her. "Maybe take a moment."

"You try, then," she said, a little snippy.

"All right. Hold on. I need to think of a memory," he muttered. What did he have that was a happy memory? He had already thought about this before, he remembered, in the context of the other method for dealing with dementors, and had come up pathetically short.

With a sigh, he raised his chin up and took a wide stance, holding his wand hand up like he was gripping a broom handle and about to take off. There wasn't any wand movement—as Hermione had helpfully summarised, the patronus charm was a 'work of the entire body.' Harry closed his eyes and imagined the wind in his face, the swooping feeling in his chest and gut as he left the ground.

" _Expecto patronum!_ "

Hermione gasped, and Harry opened his eyes to see a thin white ribbon erupting out of his wand with a hiss. It writhed through the air like smoke and streamed backwards to twine about him, and suddenly he was burning with a strange, delirious elation. He felt like he was floating, like he could fly right out of his body.

The moment ended, and he discovered that he was on the floor, gasping for breath, and Hermione was babbling in panic above him. "Oh gosh, are you all right, Harry? Harry?"

"Now, now, I'm sure it's nothing serious," came Professor Lockhart's voice. "There, look. He's coming around now."

"What happened?" Harry mumbled, settling his askew glasses back into place as he levered himself to his feet using a nearby desk.

"I don't know!" Hermione cried. "I haven't read about anything like this. Your patronus isn't supposed to be able to attack you. It's not even technically solid. Are you hurt?"

"I'm fine," Harry said, rubbing at his arms where the worm-like apparition had wound around them. His skin felt cold to the touch, but seemed otherwise unblemished. "It didn't feel… bad, exactly. Maybe it just backfired?"

"I don't think the patronus charm can backfire," Hermione argued. "It hasn't got a minimum threshold for working. At worst, nothing would happen."

"Well I think I've just proved that it can be worse than that," Harry pointed out. Something extremely disquieting occurred to him then. In the story he had read, the dark wizard, Raczidian, had tried to cast the patronus charm, but instead had produced a swarm of maggots, which had then devoured him. Was this why dark wizards didn't learn the patronus charm?

But no, that was ridiculous. It would have said so in one of the actual textbooks or references they'd looked at, if that were the case. 'Warning: if you're a bad person, you'll get eaten by bugs.' Like Hermione had pointed out, there hadn't been any such mention. Also, Petri was a terrible person who was capable of casting a normal patronus, and Harry was pretty sure he couldn't possibly be more evil than Petri.

"Maybe I just had the wrong memory or something," Harry said. "I'll try again."

"Are you sure? Maybe we should ask—" Hermione paused to glance at Lockhart, who had returned to his desk and was signing his name on letter after letter with a jewel-encrusted eagle-feather quill. "Never mind."

Harry had already taken position again, though he was still at a loss for what other memory he could use. Perhaps the feeling when he'd finally managed to conjure Ulrich? He could call up that giddy excitement, the satisfaction, but was that really happiness?

" _Expecto patronum!_ " This time, he was prepared as the mist surged from his wand and washed backwards. He dodged it with a leap to the left and it disappeared harmlessly. "It was definitely going for me."

"I don't understand," Hermione muttered, wringing her hands.

Harry had no guesses as to what was going on, and was forced to glumly reconsider his plan for approaching the dementors. Petri had seemed to think that his brief acquaintance with them would be enough to keep him safe, but Harry wanted at least some level of backup. Perhaps he could write Petri about the patronus charm anyway to see if he had pointers.

Hermione did not get much further with the charm either before she got too frustrated to produce any results. Harry couldn't help feeling a little relieved at that. The patronus charm was supposed to be above NEWT-level, after all. Maybe his problem was just some common beginner's mistake.


	57. Celebrity

Harry hadn’t needed Penelope’s timetable after all. He happened to spot her alone, paging through a paperback in the Great Hall, just before dinner, so he waved hello and slid into the seat across from her.

She glanced up at him. “Hi Harry. If you’re wondering about charms club, I’m so sorry about mucking it all up last term. I’m going to take up the lead again, and do it right this time. I managed to get us the rotunda on Saturdays.”

“Oh, that’s great,” Harry said, taking in her fastidious appearance. There was still a worried shadow in her eyes, but in general she looked back to normal. “That wasn’t actually what I wanted to talk about, though. I mean, if you have time, I’d like to ask you something.”

“Sure,” she said, tucking a scrap of parchment into her book to mark her place.

“I’m helping Percy’s sister look into what happened to him, and I was wondering if you could help,” he began, eyeing her reaction carefully.

Her face tightened. “I don’t know that I could. I’m sure I’ve been wondering about the same things as everybody else.”

“But you had his book,” Harry protested.

“His book?” Penelope repeated, the picture of innocent confusion.

Irritated, Harry said, “The cursed book that made you write in it? I don’t know if you know, but I was the one who reported it to Dumbledore.”

He wasn’t sure what he had expected in response to this admission. Anything from annoyance to gratitude, perhaps, but continued bewilderment hadn’t been it. Penelope’s brow furrowed slightly.

“I’m sorry. I can’t help you. I don’t remember,” she said at last. Harry had to clench his teeth to keep his jaw from dropping.

“You don’t remember? You were writing in it all day for weeks. How can you not remember?” His blood ran cold. “The memory charm? Have you got big gaps in your memory?”

“Not so loud,” Penelope hissed. “How did you know?”

Harry blinked. “What do you mean? If someone’s memory-charmed you, that’s… bad.” He didn’t actually know if it was illegal or anything, but it seemed like a problem.

“The doctors—I mean, healers—did it,” Penelope said. “I think it helped. I mean, I still remember going to lessons, and how I felt then, and I don’t feel nearly as bad anymore.”

“So they erased everything about the book? And you let them?” Harry asked incredulously. He couldn’t see how not knowing what had happened could possibly be better than knowing.

“Well, I didn’t ask for it,” Penelope muttered. “They just did it. I was really scared afterwards, but they told me it was standard procedure for, erm, divination abuse cases, and like I said, I think it did help.”

“Right,” Harry muttered, horrified. What did ‘divination abuse’ mean? He sighed, and despite his disappointment, managed to offer, “I’m glad you’re feeling better.”

“Wait,” Penelope said, as he stood to leave. “Could you tell me about this book, and what it has to do with Percy? I think I’m missing a lot of memories about him, especially near the—the end. I don’t even remember what happened, or hearing about it the first time. They had to tell me again after I got the charm done, but they wouldn’t say much. Apparently, whatever happened with Percy was sensitive for me, which is why they took it out, but, but maybe you can give me an outside perspective, and it’ll be all right.”

Harry stared at her for a long moment, unsure how to start. Finally, he said, “You remember that you were… seeing each other, right?”

“Yes! I remember that part,” Penelope said hastily. “I… I think we had a fight, and I know we decided to break up. But I can’t remember what it was about. I suppose it must have been something we saw in the future, right? Maybe we found out we weren’t going to be married.”

Harry somehow doubted that the necromancy book had revealed anything as benign as marriage prospects. “Well, you had this book that helped you find out your fate. You know, how you’re going to die.”

“Oh,” Penelope said, going pale. “Maybe that’s why they wouldn’t tell me.”

“Sorry,” Harry said automatically, though it was really her fault that she had asked. Penelope shook her head.

“No. I think it’s good to know. I think if they’d asked me first, I wouldn’t have let them take my memories, no matter how bad they were. I had to live with it after they did it, and I convinced myself it was all right, but I don’t know. Now that I’ve got the chance to find out more, I suppose I do want to know what happened,” she explained, a rueful smile curling her lip.

Harry nodded. “I don’t know what was in the book, but I do know that it was cursed to make you keep writing in it. You wrote in it a lot, when you had it. We think that whatever Percy found in there was what made him kill himself.” He paused as Penelope winced and reminded himself to use a euphemism next time.

“That’s horrible,” she whispered. “It was his book, you said? Where did he even get something like that?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Harry said grimly.

Penelope’s hands curled into fists. “What if I knew? I would have asked him, wouldn’t I?”

“Well, I know where he got it,” Harry hurried to clarify, “and that part makes sense, but I don’t know where it was before that. I mean, somebody found it and gave it to him as a gift, but the way they found it was suspicious.”

“What do you mean?” Penelope asked.

Harry lowered his voice, checking out of the corner of his eye that nobody was obviously listening. “We think someone planted it, to try to hurt someone. Not Percy, necessarily, but his family.”

Penelope hesitated for a moment, then said, “Can’t they report that? They could take whoever it was to court over it.”

“Well it wasn’t technically a dark artefact,” Harry said, “so it wasn’t really illegal.”

Penelope shook her head. “Even so, they could at least file a civil dispute and have it heard by the Wizengamot. They’re pure-bloods.”

“Wait, what does that have to do with it?” Harry asked.

“Only pure-bloods and some half-bloods, if they’re important, like you, I suppose, can get a case up in front of the whole Wizengamot. Otherwise it just goes to the Improper Use of Magic Office, and they don’t have nearly as many resources for investigation,” Penelope explained.

“Oh.” Harry hadn’t known that pure-bloods literally had special privileges beyond what money and nepotism could buy.

“Yeah, it’s unfair,” Penelope said, mirroring his expression. “Percy wanted to go into the Ministry and change the way the Department of Magical Law Enforcement worked, you know. He had this whole detailed vision for making things better. It was so ambitious, I sometimes joked he should’ve been in Slytherin. He didn’t like that, of course, but…” Her breath hitched, and she visibly swallowed back a sob. “In the end, I suppose he was brave after all.”

“What do you mean?” Harry asked.

Penelope dried her eyes on her sleeve and frowned. “I—I don’t know. I think that maybe I remembered something? No. That isn’t it. I still don’t remember, but I know that what I said was true. He was brave, so brave. It’s right there, but I just can’t…”

She groaned, and Harry felt an echo of her frustration in his own chest. Healers were awful, he thought suddenly, clenching his silver fist. He still remembered how the healer at St Mungo’s had tried to push him to choose a false hand that wouldn’t have let him use magic, just because of some pointless aesthetic considerations, as if she knew better than him what he wanted. The same thing had happened to Penelope, only she hadn’t even had a choice. At least Harry could attribute his own ultimate situation to the Dark Lord being evil. Healers were supposed to be good.

“It’s no use,” Penelope mumbled. “There’s no way to reverse the memory charm, anyway. I think if we want to know what happened, we’ll need to do some good old-fashioned detective work. It’s going to sound daft, but I think we should look into divination. I know it’s what got me into this mess in the first place, but when you want to know something, that’s the most obvious way to do it. I suppose you wouldn’t know any, yet, though. It’s a third-year elective.”

“I know some,” Harry said. “Tarot and tessomancy. And dreams.” Dream interpretation was sort of necromancy-adjacent, was it not?

“Wow, really? I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. We’re Ravenclaws,” Penelope said with a weak chuckle. “I still have some books that I had checked out from the library before everything. Divination books, I mean, and I’m not in NEWT Divination so they can’t be study materials. Since I can’t properly remember them, that’s probably evidence that they’re related to what happened to me and Percy, right? We can start there.”

This was much more of a lead than Harry had expected. He nodded, enthused at finally having something concrete to look into.

They returned to the Ravenclaw common room after dinner and Penelope invited him over to her carrel in the back. Harry had never been in this section of the common room before, as it was usually reserved for fifth years and above. It was a cosy space with a low ceiling, panelled with warm wood. Every surface had been repurposed into some kind of bookshelf, even the low walls sectioning off the carrels, and there must have been a soundproofing charm of some sort on the area, because as soon as they entered, the chatter from the rest of the common room cut off abruptly.

“Sorry, there’s only one chair,” Penelope muttered, and it sounded curiously close to his ear even though she was several feet away. “Hold on. _Selleous_.”

With a thunk, a basic wooden chair popped out of thin air. Harry gaped at the conjuration, impressed, but Penelope grimaced.

“It’s still wrong,” she said. Harry did notice that there was no upholstery, and it was extremely smooth, as well as a bit small, its back not quite reaching the lip of the desk.

“Still amazing,” Harry complimented, sitting down carefully. “Thanks.”

“Hopefully it doesn’t vanish randomly,” Penelope muttered. Harry resolved to stay vigilant.

Penelope dug through the row of books in the overhead shelf in front of her and pulled out several volumes: _A Primer to Contingent Reading, Changing the Future,_ and _Unravelling Fate_.

“I suppose I should read them, see if that jogs my memory,” she said. “But I’m a little afraid, and also I don’t exactly have a lot of time, in between my prefect duties and clubs. Not trying to make excuses—I just mean that you can look at them too, if you want.”

“Which one should I start with?” Harry asked. In response, Penelope grabbed a cup that had been sitting in the corner and upended it to reveal some oddly-shaped dice.

She snorted. “I can’t stop using divination, even now. I suppose that divination abuse diagnosis was warranted. Granted, this is just arithmancy, which ought to be safe.” She picked up several dice and rolled them, making a note of the results on a spare bit of parchment. Then she added up some of the numbers and scrutinised the books for a few moments before tapping _Unravelling Fate_. “You should read this one, and I’ll get started on the first one.”

Harry eyed the dice cup. “How does that work? The arithmancy?”

“It’s a bit complicated to explain. I start with each of the titles, change the letters to numbers, and then reduce them. Reducing means summing up the digits again and again until there’s only one left. Then the dice rolls get added too, and then I compare those to the reduction of my own birthday, for me, and your birthday, for you, and if there’s a match, that’s the best choice,” Penelope explained.

Harry only understood half of what she had said, so he seized upon the most obvious question. “How did you know my birthday?”

Penelope laughed. “You do know that you’re famous, right? You’ve shown up on Arithmancy assignments before. And it’s easy to remember, since it’s the last day in the month.”

“Oh, right,” Harry said, a little disturbed that he was apparently famous enough to be an example on someone’s homework.

The conjured chair chose that moment to vanish, and Harry barely managed to fall without hurting himself. Penelope swore, apologised for her language, and then apologised again for the chair, but Harry waved her off.

“I suppose that’s my cue to go,” he said, taking his assigned book. Thankfully, it seemed fairly thin.

For lack of anything better to do, he retreated up to the dormitory to start reading.

“Have you ever wondered if you could change your fate?” read the very first line. Harry leaned forward, eyes skimming the rest of the page as if demanding the answers reveal themselves to him immediately. Of course, he had no such luck; naturally, now that the book had his interest, it went on to dryly summarise how each chapter would cover one type of divination, interpretation strategies, and risk mitigation.

The bed frame rattled with Harry’s agitation as he forced himself not to page ahead. It was better to read the book more closely, so as not to miss what he was looking for. Still, he was filled with doubt. Everything he knew about divination suggested that once seen, fate was immutable. If something could be foretold and had been, then it was sure to happen in some way consistent with the foretelling.

The book hardly gave any promising information to the contrary, the introduction only hinting that it was possible to ‘unravel fate’ by ‘tugging on the proper strings’. The first proper chapter, which was on tessomancy, explained that since strict adherence to symbol sets made the results necessarily vague, one could easily engineer a situation that fulfilled the prediction and render it inert. Most of the other chapters ended up being variations on the same concept, with an abundance of specific examples that Harry supposed might be useful if he ever needed to do something like take back his own tarot reading. That would have been nice to have before Vince had tried to kill him and then got trapped in his own home. For now, he skimmed over the examples.

The last chapter turned out to be on necromancy. Sitting bolt upright, Harry dropped the book down on the bed and rolled forward onto his stomach, balancing his head in one hand as he squinted carefully at the words.

 _Necromancy is the most dangerous and direct of all divinatory disciplines, and as such, subverting its results requires dire interventions. The author fully acknowledges that these interventions are theoretical_ _in nature_ _, and would not suggest any practitioner seriously consider implementing them. In this chapter, we shall only concern ourselves with forms of necromancy that do not involve any desecration of remains, namely, psychography, séance, and dream induction. Even these relatively benign techniques can exact an unexpectedly heavy price._

_Because necromancy is usually undirected divination, practitioners are at high risk of divining hazardous information. The methods for mitigating unwanted predictions that we have already discussed in this book are unlikely to work for necromantic results, which are almost always both explicit and negative. Consequently, it is often infeasible to reinterpret the prediction in an acceptable fashion. The best way to protect oneself is to avoid attempting necromancy altogether._

“Wow, so helpful,” Harry muttered, rolling his eyes. The book spent a few more paragraphs waffling about exactly how inapplicable everything in the previous chapters was, before proposing its theory: necromancy only worked on one person at a time, which meant that any other people involved in the predicted fate were not themselves bound by fate, and so removing them would render the predicted outcome impossible.

Harry blinked, gut twisting as he began to understand. If the people involved in a prediction all died, then it didn’t have to come true—he had known this already, hadn’t he? Rookwood had told him about it in the Department of Mysteries, in the context of prophecies. It didn’t help Harry or the Dark Lord, because their prophecy didn’t actually specify which one of them would kill the other, leaving them inextricably bound. But in a less intricate case, it might well be possible to get rid of one’s would-be murderer before the murder could happen.

The book went on to disabuse him of the notion that it was at all easy—necromancy could be dangerous precisely because it drove people to do foolish things that would get them killed through self-fulfilling predictions. Preventing one’s own fate almost never worked. However, preventing another person’s fate was possible because there was one person that the diviner would always be able to remove reliably—themselves.

“Oh no,” Harry muttered, his heart sinking to the floor.

He tried to tell Ginny about his suspicions the next day at lunch, but when he walked over to the Gryffindor table, everybody nearby turned to stare at him completely tactlessly, and Ginny, sandwiched between her older brothers, face-palmed.

“Look here. Our Gin-Gin’s got an admirer,” said the Weasley twin to her left. The one on the right sighed theatrically and pretended to wipe a tear from his eye.

“She’s growing up so fast.”

Ginny, still twisted around in her seat to face Harry, rolled her eyes and did not acknowledge them with a verbal response. Instead, she made frantic shooing motions towards Harry, clearly trying to get him to leave.

“I found something,” he began, but she shushed him and mouthed, “Later,” so he turned around and walked back to the Ravenclaw table awkwardly, face burning despite that he was sure that he hadn’t done anything wrong or embarrassing. He could still feel eyes searing into his back. He hated it.

His hand twitched to grip his wand, which sent a warm thrum up his arm, and he dropped it like it had burned him. No right hand, he reminded himself. It was a bad idea to even keep his holly wand in his pocket, in easy reach, but it felt unsafe to leave it in his dormitory, though rationally he knew that nothing would happen to it there.

Later, when he left the Great Hall, Ginny ambushed him just outside and dragged him over to a nearby broom closet.

“Don’t be so obvious,” she hissed.

“I didn’t know it was supposed to be a secret that we know each other,” Harry protested. “You come over to the Ravenclaw table all the time.”

“I’m not Harry bloody Potter,” she said. “Nobody pays attention to me. This is awful. Now Fred and George know we’re up to something, and they’ll be stalking us.”

“They’re your brothers. And they’re older, so they might know more. Couldn’t we just ask for their help too?” Harry asked, nonplussed.

“No! I’ve got to do this alone. Look. You haven’t got siblings, so you wouldn’t understand. But trust me when I say they won’t be any help. They’ll just try to stop me, because they think it’ll protect me,” Ginny muttered.

“But surely they want to know what happened to Percy as much as you do?” Harry pressed.

“They’ve probably been looking into it on their own,” Ginny admitted, staring at her feet. “I’ve seen them whispering to each other in the corner of the common room, and then when they see me they’ll laugh and pretend they were just planning pranks. They don’t want me involved, but I don’t care. I won’t let them get in my way.”

“Okay then,” Harry conceded, though he still thought it was completely daft that they wouldn’t just pool all their knowledge for the best chance at getting answers.

“So, what were you going to tell me?” Ginny asked.

“Can we take this somewhere else?” Harry said, shifting uncomfortably in the cramped space. He still remembered his close call with Filch earlier that year, and the admonishment not to be seen in any broom closet again.

“I picked this place so I could throw off the twins,” Ginny said. Harry stared at her blankly. When she did not elaborate, he realised that she probably couldn’t see him in the dark. Why he could see her was another question that he’d rather not think too hard about.

“I don’t understand,” Harry said.

Ginny sighed. “You know, broom closets, snogging?”

“What?” Harry blurted, thought process soundly shattered.

“Right. Only child,” Ginny muttered to herself. “People use broom closets to snog, and not to have a regular talk, so they’ll come to the wrong conclusion.”

“Yes, I know that people—” Harry choked on air and had to take a moment to calm himself. “We’re—I’m twelve, and you’re what, eleven?”

“So? Annie Garland’s in my year and she’s dating Michael Corner,” Ginny informed him matter-of-factly, and Harry choked again as his housemate’s name came up.

“That aside, how would your brothers have any idea where we are? They were still at the Gryffindor table when I left,” Harry mumbled.

“They’ve got some secret way of finding people,” Ginny said, shrugging. “I don’t know what exactly it is, but I know it’s pretty accurate. It’s how they do their pranks without getting caught by Filch or Snape.”

“Speaking of Filch, that’s sort of why I don’t want to stay here,” Harry said. He relayed his traumatic encounter and she laughed at him.

“That’s nothing. You are such a goody-two-shoes. Have you ever even broken a school rule?”

“I’ve been in the Forbidden Forest,” Harry confessed hotly, bewildered and a little offended at being called a goody-two-shoes, of all things.

Ginny sniffed. “Uh-huh. Did you even get detention?”

“I didn’t get caught,” Harry muttered. “And I’ve been in the Forbidden Forest _for_ detention, too, I’ll have you know. Look. I just want to stay out of trouble if I can. So let’s just go to a classroom or something.”

He threw open the door, half expecting Filch to be standing on the other side, but the coast was clear. Ginny sighed, relenting, and they found a nice unoccupied study room on the first floor. It was equipped with a small square table, four chairs, and a blackboard. Harry reached into his pocket and forcibly extracted the book he had borrowed from Penelope. It barely fit through the opening, but that was enough for him to shove it out onto the table. “I talked to Penelope. She got memory-charmed by healers.”

“That’s convenient, isn’t it?” Ginny muttered, eyes narrowed.

Harry glanced up in confusion. “Sorry?”

“The only person who knows anything about that book and she gets her memory wiped. You know who donates loads of money to St Mungo’s? Malfoy, that’s who,” Ginny said.

“Oh,” Harry said weakly. He had been annoyed at the healers’ apparent incompetence, but it hadn’t even occurred to him to question their motives, which was silly. After all, he’d literally seen Yaxley cast the imperius curse on a healer right in front of him. Anybody could be compromised. “Well Penelope still had some books she’d checked out before that, and I think I found out why your brother might have done what he did. Here, read this.”

He flipped to the necromancy chapter and showed it to Ginny.

“Necromancy? Isn’t that like, dark magic? Percy would never,” she protested.

“It’s not dark,” Harry said, and she levelled a flat look at him. He added, “Not necessarily, anyway. And the book he had is supposed to be for a type of necromancy. I mentioned that it shows you how you’ll die, right? It does that by having you write down messages from dead people.”

“Sounds pretty dark to me,” said Ginny, her eyes darting across the page. “Can you tell me what I’m supposed to be getting from this? All I see are a bunch of words.”

Harry sighed. He had hoped that Ginny would be able to draw an independent conclusion from reading the chapter, in case he had jumped straight to the worst-case scenario, but he had forgotten that she wasn’t a bookworm and also probably didn’t know anything about divination.

“Basically, it says that the only reliable way of preventing your future from happening is by killing yourself,” Harry said.

“Well, yeah, duh,” Ginny said after a moment, and Harry figured that said out loud, it did sound sort of obvious. “But why in the world would Percy have wanted to prevent his own future?”

“It probably looked pretty bad,” Harry pointed out. “Necromancy is kind of dangerous because you usually see bad stuff.”

“Definitely sounds like dark magic,” Ginny reiterated. “But seriously, how bad could it have possibly been that he would’ve rather died than live through it? It can’t just be that he saw that he wouldn’t become Minister for Magic and decided his life wasn’t worth living, can it? If it was something that stupid he wouldn’t have kept it to himself. He’d have told someone!”

Harry blinked. That made sense. “So it was something he couldn’t tell you. Maybe all of you die.”

“What?” Ginny demanded, and Harry felt suddenly certain that he was right.

“Look, it fits. If he found out that you, or other people in your family, were going to die—soon, probably, otherwise it doesn’t make sense—and he could prevent it if he just took himself out of the equation, then he wouldn’t have been able to say anything to anyone, right?”

Ginny clenched her fists. “How would that even work? How would him dying stop us from dying?”

“I don’t know. We need the book, since Penelope doesn’t remember anything. I should just ask my uncle for it,” Harry muttered.

“You think that’ll really work?” Ginny asked, her face screwing up unreadably. “There’s no way, right? My parents would ground me for life if I even brought up wanting to look at a dark artefact.”

Harry was for once thankful that he did not have a normal guardian in any sense of the word.

“Don’t worry. I’m pretty sure he’ll let me have it,” he said.

There was some time before his next lesson, so he composed a letter to Petri expressing his newfound interest in psychography and his desire to try it with the book, since he didn’t want to waste time with an inferior medium. He threw in a question on the patronus charm as well, and sent it off with a school owl.

Then it was time for Potions. Having had to run to the dungeons from the owlry, Harry was nearly late, breathing heavily as he burst through the door.

“So, our resident celebrity has finally deigned to join us,” Professor Snape remarked, his hard black gaze narrowing in on him. Harry felt a flush crawl up the back of his neck even as the perspiration froze on his back.

Everybody was looking at him. The path to his and Hannah’s desk at the centre-right of the dungeon felt interminable, every creak of his trainers against the stone floor, every sidling step between chairs sending a renewed prickle of humiliation across his nape. He dragged his chair out, wincing as it screeched in protest, and sat quickly. Unable to help himself, he checked the time. He hadn’t been late, after all. It was exactly half past one.

“Put that away, Potter! Five points from Ravenclaw. Were your brains addled over the holiday? Or perhaps you never had any, and have just been relying on the hard work of others to carry you through?” Professor Snape spat, casting a meaningful glance towards Hannah.

Astonished at this open vitriol, Harry almost dropped his wand and had to scramble to catch it and shove it into his pocket. Five points. He’d never paid much attention to house points before, but he’d also never lost points just like that. Hannah gave him a worried look and put a hand on his arm.

As soon as Professor Snape finished with his introductory lecture on the day’s potion (the epilation unction) and put the instructions up on the board, Hannah leaned in and whispered, “What did you do?”

“What do you mean what did I do?” Harry demanded. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Professor Snape,” she said almost inaudibly, glancing nervously to where he was canvassing the back of the classroom, “is obviously furious at you for something.”

“I don’t know what his problem is,” Harry insisted. “I wasn’t even late.”

In fact, he hadn’t even been the last person to arrive. Zacharias Smith had strolled in almost five minutes late, and had got little more than a disapproving sneer. Professor Snape wasn’t exactly known to favour Hufflepuffs, so the sheer unfairness of it was mind-boggling.

“You did have your wand out,” Hannah pointed out.

Harry sighed. “Yeah, that was stupid. I wasn’t thinking.” Actually, he’d thought that since they hadn’t started brewing yet, there was no reason why he shouldn’t be allowed to hold his wand. He’d assumed that Professor Snape would have lost interest in him as soon as he sat down, as usual, but no—he’d paid attention, and worse, Harry was almost certain that he was still paying attention, watching him from the corner of his eye even as he swept around the dungeon, supervising everybody’s brews.

There was no more fidelius charm, he reminded himself. Professor Snape had always had a funny reaction to the charm. Perhaps a year and a half of being driven to consternation by his inability to recognise Harry had engendered subconscious resentment within him.

Despite himself, Harry tensed up as Professor Snape approached their station. Hannah had just added the chizpurfle carapaces and Harry was responsible for stirring eighteen times.

Professor Snape paused directly in front of them. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Harry’s eyes leapt to the blackboard in panic—boil water, add chopped turmeric root, simmer five minutes, turn down the heat, sprinkle in crushed chizpurfle carapaces, stir eighteen times until pale orange—and of course he’d now lost count of how many stirs he’d done. But everything they had done so far looked right.

“I’m stirring, sir,” Harry mumbled, eyeing his potion. He thought he was on stir number ten, maybe nine, or was it eleven?

Professor Snape sneered. “A charitable way to put it. And in which direction are you stirring?”

Harry slowed his movement as he stared at the glass rod gripped in his hand. “Anticlockwise, sir. It doesn’t say in the instructions—”

“I see, so it doesn’t say in the instructions, and therefore you can do as you like?” Professor Snape demanded. Harry stared at the potion in horror for a moment, his stomach flipping nauseatingly as he wondered if it might be ruined, before some wits returned to him. The potion was yellow-orange and getting more orange by the moment, as expected. Eldred’s advice suddenly came to him.

“No, sir, it’s just that we’re only combining unreactive ingredients right now, so it should work no matter what direction I’m stirring in,” he said, thankful that he sounded much more assured than he felt.

Professor Snape stiffened, before nodding once. “Quite. Carry on then,” he said, walking away. Harry swallowed back a curse as he peered into the cauldron again, trying to judge when it was adequately ‘pale orange’, since he had by now completely lost count. He reminded himself to pay more attention to which way he was stirring next time, as well. Though he normally automatically stirred clockwise unless instructed otherwise, it seemed that switching to his left hand had reversed that tendency.

“Nice save,” Hannah whispered.

“Thanks, but I wasn’t even doing anything wrong,” Harry muttered. He was restless with unwarranted adrenaline. “You saw that, right? What I was doing was fine, and he came over and asked a trick question.”

“Yeah. I almost had a heart attack,” Hannah agreed, shaking her head. “Maybe he actually likes you? He asks Stephen hard questions, doesn’t he?”

“Likes me?” Harry repeated with incredulity. “Hannah, I’ve got an E in Potions.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?” she asked. Harry shook his head.

“Haven’t you heard of the Ravenclaw marking scale? O is Okay, E is Embarrassing, A is Awful, P is Pathetic, and D is Dead.”

Hannah giggled. “What’s T?”

Harry shrugged. “Still Troll, I suppose? Maybe you can’t get a T, since you’re already dead by D.”

“Tortured in Tartarus,” Hannah suggested.

“What’s Tartarus?” Harry asked, prompting a whole whispered lecture on Greek myths and stories, most of which Harry had never heard of. Hannah was conscientious enough to go quiet every time Snape approached, and they managed to finish up their potion without further note. Judging by the final shade, which was more of a washed-out cabbage colour than the expected ‘pea green’, they’d gone slightly off and would probably be getting an A at best. Harry convinced Hannah to bring it up to the front and escaped the classroom as quickly as he could.

The final lesson of the day, if one didn’t count Astronomy, was Charms. Harry was actually looking forward to it, because Professor Flitwick had promised them that after the holiday they would finally be starting spell series. That meant that Harry could spend the practical part of the lesson working on more advanced forms of the spells they were covering.

Professor Flitwick beamed at him as he entered, and Harry relaxed a little, despite himself. It was good to know that Professor Snape’s sudden attitude change wasn’t part of some larger trend. One unreasonably sour professor, he supposed he could handle.

He sat down next to Neville, and they spent the lesson repeatedly casting the severing charm at sadly deflated cushions. Harry felt pleased with the improvement in his left-handed casting. It was coming along more quickly than he’d expected, at least for spells with simple wand movements and minor effects. He felt bad watching Neville continue to struggle with his wand—if only Harry could use his right hand, then he could let Neville use his willow wand instead. The thought did briefly occur to him of lending his holly wand, but there was no guarantee that it would fit Neville at all, and he couldn’t help feeling a ridiculous pang of distress at the very idea of somebody else touching it.

After Charms, Harry headed downstairs for his meeting with his so-called fan, whose name had already slipped his mind. He cursed himself for not asking Hermione for more details. All he knew was that it was some Gryffindor first year.

He needn’t have worried. As soon as he cleared the curve of the grand stair, he almost tripped over a slight boy with a head of mousy brown curls.

“Sorry, sorry. All right there, Harry?” the boy asked.

“Fine,” Harry muttered. “Why were you just standing there?”

“Oh, sorry, I was waiting, and I got a bit impatient, so I moved to wait up here. I was just so excited to meet you. I’m Colin Creevey, by the way—um, Hermione told you about me, right?”

“She did,” Harry confirmed. Awkwardly, he held out his left hand. “Harry Potter. It’s nice to meet you.”

Colin grabbed his hand with both of his own and pumped it up and down vigorously. “It’s brilliant to finally get to talk to you properly. Everyone’s been telling me all about you ever since I got here, about how you survived You-Know-Who as a baby, and how he disappeared, and how you’ve got that lightning-bolt scar now. Would it be all right if I took a photo? Just so I can show it to my dad, to prove that I met you?”

He held up what Harry was pretty sure was a muggle camera, which hung from a strap around his neck.

Harry shrugged, a little uncomfortable with the thought. As far as he could remember, nobody had ever taken a photograph of him before. The reporters that had invaded St Mungo’s had certainly tried to with their monstrous, smoking contraptions, but as the article about him in the _Prophet_ had not included a picture of him, he supposed they’d failed to get a good shot.

Just then, something from long ago tickled his mind—‘ _we can’t be photographed,_ ’ Silviu had told him once as they passed under muggle CCTV on a trip to steal a dead baby.

“I might not show up right in photos,” Harry said, and it sounded a bit too much like an evasion even to his own ears, so that he flushed.

Colin frowned slightly. “What do you mean?”

Harry sighed, hoping he wasn’t about to scare the boy off. Or perhaps it would be good if he did. “I’m part vampire. Vampires don’t show up in pictures, but I’m not actually sure if that means I won’t. I suppose you can try.”

Colin’s eyes grew round with what appeared to be wonder. “Oh, wow! Nobody told me that about you. Do you drink blood?”

“Sometimes,” Harry admitted.

“That’s wicked,” said Colin with a wide grin, as if he hadn’t just discovered that his classmate might be a bloodsucking monster. “I didn’t even know vampires were real. This place is amazing, isn’t it? I’m learning to cast spells and make magic potions, and meeting a national hero who’s a real life vampire—”

“ _Part_ vampire,” Harry stressed.

“—Gosh—I mean, Merlin—it’s still like a dream. All right. So for the picture, could you maybe go stand over there, a bit under the chandelier? Thanks.”

Harry stood stiffly where he’d been directed, reluctantly sympathising a little with Draco’s disdain for mudbloods. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong with Colin. He seemed nice enough. He was just so… naive, not even scared of vampires and happily gushing about his own ignorance to somebody he’d just met.

Colin snapped several photographs from various angles. Harry tried his best not to blink against the blinding flash and to paste some approximation of a smile on his face. When they were done, he slumped with relief, gesturing for Colin to join him in the Great Hall rather than continue loitering outside.

“So what did you want to talk about?” Harry asked.

“Anything!” Colin said immediately. “I mean, I’d like to get to know you a bit better. Maybe be friends? But only if you want to. I’ve, er, been really curious about something. There are rumours—I mean, lots of people have been saying that you survived You-Know-Who trying to kill you a second time over Christmas. That he’s come back for revenge but failed again. Is that true?”

“What’s this? Are you giving an interview, Harry?”

Harry’s heart skipped a beat as Professor Lockhart waylaid them immediately past the entrance to the Great Hall. How long had he been listening? Fumbling in panic for something to say, he seized upon the first wild thing to pop into his brain: “Yes. I’m practising. With interviews, and meeting fans. You said something earlier about an interview for _Witch Weekly_? That is, if you were being serious.”

Lockhart beamed and clapped him on the shoulder. “Of course I was, Harry, and I’m delighted to see you taking this very seriously as well.” He leaned in closer, winking conspiratorially. “Take care not to give it all away before the opening act, though. Rehearsal is all well and good, but you have to save the juicy secrets for the performance.” He mimed zipping his lips.

“Ah… right,” Harry said, worrying over whether this was some kind of oblique threat. Come to think of it, he probably shouldn’t be confirming the Dark Lord’s return to random people. Neville was one thing, but Colin—well, just from first impressions, Colin seemed like exactly the sort of person to whom one shouldn’t entrust private information. Lockhart squeezed Harry’s shoulder once more before ambling off, humming to himself.

“You’re giving an interview in _Witch Weekly_?” Colin asked with the same tone of wonder that he had applied to the vampire revelation.

“I suppose I am,” Harry muttered, his face burning. Being famous was terrible. It was almost worse than receiving assassination attempts from his friends because they didn’t recognise him.

“Wow. I’ll definitely read it. So maybe I shouldn’t ask you too many questions, so I don’t spoil anything, like Professor Lockhart said. He’s really amazing too, you know? Like a superhero,” Colin told him.

“I know,” Harry said dryly, recovering somewhat from his private humiliation now that he considered how Lockhart bragged about himself at every available opportunity. Perhaps shamelessness could be learned.

Thankfully, Colin steered away from sensitive topics as promised, but that didn’t stop him from filling the hour with a ridiculous volume of questions that Harry had never before even contemplated.

“What’s your favourite colour?” had been innocuous enough, but then there had been weird ones like, “What’s your favourite type of milk?”, to which Harry had responded with surprise that there was more than one type of milk.

“My dad’s a milkman,” Colin had explained, before enumerating the various dairy products that his father’s firm offered for delivery. The utter mundanity of it was strangely engrossing, and Harry found himself relaxing into the conversation. He drew the line at staying at the Gryffindor table for dinner, however, fleeing back to his own house table before the others in his year could arrive. After all, he had some dignity to maintain.

He was waylaid before he got there by Draco Malfoy, who had crossed neatly in front of him and put a hand on his arm. Harry started violently, his eyes tracing the deliberate path the other boy had taken from an unassuming corner of the Slytherin table. Had Draco been spying on him?

“What?” he demanded, perhaps with a tad too much aggression. Draco blinked at him, unfazed, and pressed something square and hard into his right hand.

Harry dropped it. It hit the ground with a muffled clink evocative of metal.

“Careful,” Draco hissed, his brows pinched together, as he knelt to swipe it back up.

Harry took a step back, but Draco hadn’t let go of his arm. “What are you doing?”

“Just take it. It’s a message from Vince.”

At this, Harry ripped his hand away, breaking Draco’s grip with startling ease. “That does not make me want to touch it more.”

Draco rolled his eyes, rubbing daintily at his knuckles. “That’s just my two-way mirror, you twit. So that you two can talk. He says he got your letter, by the way. I can’t believe you wrote him a letter.”

“You’re the one who said to write,” Harry pointed out.

“I didn’t mean it literally,” Draco said. “I suppose you could’ve drawn him a picture.”

“I can’t draw.”

Draco arched an eyebrow, as if to ask, ‘is that my problem?’ He shoved the alleged mirror in Harry’s direction again.

With a sigh, Harry accepted it, pinching it gingerly between his thumb and forefinger. The danger of something happening to his good arm seemed too high to countenance his use of it, so just this once, he thought, it would be prudent to use the silver hand. The thought, however ridiculous, occurred to him again that perhaps that was the Dark Lord’s command to Draco—just to subtly contrive circumstances so that he would be made again and again to break his promise to Dumbledore.

“Give it back when you’re done with it,” Draco said. “You’d better not lose it or destroy it. It’s a family heirloom.”

Harry blinked to hide the twitch of his eyes. Of course Malfoys would have heirloom mirrors. He nodded and pivoted, stalking along the Ravenclaw table until he was somewhere in the middle, on the far side away from the Slytherins. Unable to shake his paranoia, he cast structure sight on himself immediately, carefully brushing aside the cloth that wrapped the mirror.

Pale red and blue lines blossomed before him like a firework. It certainly wasn’t the same kind of magic as his hand, but that left plenty up for interpretation. All the conditional magic extended directly from the centre point. That probably meant it would be easy enough to undo, and wasn’t anything bad. Unsatisfied but feeling foolish, Harry cancelled his spell and slipped the mirror and its cloth into his pocket for later.

Dinner passed in a haze of boiled pork and peas. Harry shovelled food into his mouth without tasting it and found himself unable to pay attention to Terry and Lisa’s explosive debate about whether the Hobgoblins’ new lead singer was a talentless flop, though he normally would have jumped at the chance to participate for his own cultural development.

After dinner, he cloistered himself behind his bed hangings and fumbled with his robes, shaking the mirror out of his pocket. Then he stopped cold, biting his lip and glaring in mistrust at the ornate silver frame with its pearl-inlaid whorls and delicate planetary filigree. He hadn’t asked Draco how to operate it, but logically, since it was a mirror, he would be able to activate its effects by looking into it.

He conjured a snake and instructed it to examine itself in the mirror. The snake was not happy to see its likeness and immediately thrashed against the glass, but seemed to experience no adverse magical effect, so Harry told it to go curl up in the corner of his bed and conducted a final test. He produced the packet of rue that Neville had sent him and snapped off another leaflet, bracing himself as he shoved it under his tongue.

The sight of the mirror filled him with no more dread than he was already experiencing, so he finally relaxed and nudged it towards him. Still half prepared to drop dead instantly, he looked. His reflection looked back at him, scowling.

“Right. Vince,” he said aloud. The surface of the mirror rippled faintly, but nothing else happened. “Vincent Crabbe,” Harry tried.

This time, his reflection smoothed into something rounder and thicker. The eyes wandered apart, settling into an uncertain, murky brown. Vince recoiled shyly.

“Vince, is that you?” Harry said, leaning forward.

“Hi Harry,” said Vince. “I got your letter. Told Draco to lend you his mirror, so I hope you’ve got it now. Just tell me when you do. I mean, if you still want to talk. Wouldn’t blame you if you never wanted to see my daft mug again.”

Harry opened his mouth to respond, but the image of Vince faded away, and he realised it had been a recorded message. The image in the mirror cleared away to show a vaulted wooden ceiling. Harry wondered with a jolt whether he was looking into Vince’s house—perhaps his room?

“Hello?” he called out, unsure whether his voice would be recorded or if it could simply be heard on the other side.

He heard a clatter and a thud, and then Vince’s face came swimming into view as the image in the glass swung around rapidly. Harry spied forest green wallpaper and the mahogany posts of a large bed for a moment before the mirror was dominated by Vince’s bulky form.

“Harry, that you?”

“Yeah, it’s me,” Harry said. His heart thudded in his ears, and he suddenly had no idea what to say.

Vince’s cervine eyes drooped at the corners. “I’m sorry about what happened. I didn’t know. I swear. Would’ve stopped it if I knew. You’ve got to believe me, Harry.”

Harry wet his suddenly parched lips. “I know, nobody knew I was me, you couldn’t have known it was for me.”

A perplexed look came onto Vince’s face. “What? No. I’m not a complete moron; of I course I didn’t muck up telling the owl where to go. I mean my dad switched the box.”

For some reason, it had never once occurred to him that Vince could actually have been completely innocent. Harry felt an instant stab of guilt and relief, twisted together, deep in his chest. His rue did not sting him and Vince’s face was sad and guileless.

“But Halloween,” Harry blurted. “That was you, wasn’t it, who blew up the ceiling?”

Vince flinched visibly. “Oh. Yeah. Sorry.”

“Why?” Harry demanded with bated breath, as if a moment to inhale might cause him to miss the response.

“I lied to you. You and Hannah and Neville,” Vince said, looking away. “And Professor Snape. I was trying to learn curses on account of my dad saying you needed to get hurt, so you’d be sent out of the castle. Wasn’t trying to get you killed, I swear.”

“Just horribly maimed, got it,” Harry muttered.

“They would’ve fixed it at St Mungo’s,” Vince argued weakly, before apologising again.

“But why?” Harry asked again.

Vince screwed up his face. “So that Dumbledore would be discretined—discrent—”

“Discredited?” Harry couldn’t help filling in.

“Yeah that. And then there’d be no more mudbloods at Hogwarts,” Vince finished.

Harry blinked at this logical leap. “What? What does Dumbledore have to do with mudbloods?”

“He’s the reason they’re allowed, isn’t he?” Vince said, shrugging.

That didn’t sound remotely true, but the facts were beside the point. “And you hate mudbloods more than you care about your friends, is that it?” Harry asked, fists suddenly clenching. He’d thought for sure there would be some explanation where Vince had acted because he’d been fearful for his life, and not… whatever this was.

“No!” Vince cried. “Course not. I’m bungling this up all up, aren’t I? I was just trying to explain about what I heard from my father. I didn’t want you to get hurt at all, Harry, but see, you were going to be hurt anyway if I didn’t do anything. My father was saying that people would be racing to do you in and I had to get there first. Except without actually doing you in.”

Harry breathed out the last of his air, trying to still his thundering heart. It did sort of make sense, in a backwards way.

“How about next time, you just tell me about the plot to do me in?” he finally said, very quietly. His face hurt with the effort of swallowing his temper, like acid was prickling in his cheeks.

Vince looked suitably chastened. He hung his head. “I was scared. Didn’t think you’d believe me. I told Draco, and he didn’t believe me.”

Draco was under the imperius curse, Harry wanted to say, but he bit it back. Vince looked up and, upon seeing his pinched expression, added, “He told me my father just wanted me to get myself expelled so I couldn’t come back to Hogwarts.”

Harry blinked. That was actually a reasonable conclusion, for someone who had no idea what was really going on. “And you didn’t think he might have a point?”

“You and Draco don’t understand what’s happening. It’s really big. Bigger than school,” Vince muttered.

There it was. Paradoxically, Harry breathed out in relief. “The Dark Lord,” he whispered. Vince looked up with fear and reverence shining in his eyes. “I know all about him,” Harry reassured him, but the quivering terror seemed to win out in Vince, and his face crumpled.

“So you already knew about what I was doing?” he muttered.

“What? No,” said Harry, trying and failing to wrap his head around that leap of logic. “I meant, I know that the Dark Lord’s back, that’s all.”

“Shh. We’re not supposed to talk about it,” Vince hissed, glancing over his shoulder as if expecting the Dark Lord to materialise behind him. “How do you know that, anyway?”

“It’s complicated,” Harry said. “How come you know? Draco doesn’t know.”

“Draco’s a spoiled brat,” Vince said, as if that explained everything. Perhaps it did. “So, I suppose you know everything now. Are we still okay?”

Harry held his breath for a moment before sighing. “Yeah. We’re okay. Just don’t…” He bit his lip as he realised that it might be unrealistic to require Vince not to attempt to kill him again, given how things were. “Just warn me next time before you try to kill me.”

A nervous grin broke over Vince’s face. “Definitely.”

“Great. So, I’ve been wondering. You didn’t also lie to Draco about why you aren’t at Hogwarts, did you?” Harry asked. “He told me your mum was ill. I mean, sorry, if she is.”

“I dunno,” Vince muttered.

“What? What do you mean you don’t know?”

“Haven’t seen her at all,” Vince explained. “Father says she’s got spattergroit, and I can’t visit her rooms because it’s really contagious.”

“Well then why in the world can’t you come back to Hogwarts?” Harry demanded.

Vince shrugged. “Just an excuse, isn’t it? He’s teaching me… things, and that’s nice, but I do miss you lot. And I miss duelling club.”

Harry raised his eyebrows. “Duelling club, really?”

“Only place to practise hexes properly. It’s not the same when I’m on my own, or with my father.” Vince paused, making a face. “If you learn any good tricks, you’ll tell me, won’t you? I’ll send you your own two-way mirror so we can talk whenever. That was what I was actually going to send you for Christmas. Promise it’s for real this time.”

“Right. Thanks,” Harry mumbled, unable to keep his voice from thinning with leeriness. “But about duelling club—I’m not sure if I’m going to keep going.” The thought had just occurred to him that duelling club was effectively run by Snape, and the very thought of encountering Snape again, before it was absolutely necessary, sent a hot rush of cringing humiliation up his throat, like bile.

“What? No! You have to,” Vince whinged, pursing his lips and widening his eyes. “Come on, you know I can’t get Draco to go, and Goyle won’t be able to explain anything properly.”

“Can’t you just—” Harry was about to say ‘read a book’, before he remembered that Vince in fact couldn’t. He coughed. “How come you don’t just learn to read? Then you can study whatever you want on your own. And don’t give me rubbish about mudbloods. Draco can read.”

“I can read what needs reading,” Vince insisted. “I got better since last year, you know. I read your letter just fine. Everything else is lies.”

“What?” Harry choked out, laughing. “What do you mean it’s lies?”

“What I said,” Vince maintained with a serious mien. “You know how in transfiguration, we have to draw those shapes for sounds, to make things closer together?”

“Yeah, the transfiguration alphabet. The regular alphabet works the same way,” Harry said.

Vince shook his head. “It doesn’t, though. Regular writing doesn’t mean anything. Or it can mean something different from what it actually says. It’s a lie, fake.”

“The literal point of writing is to mean something,” Harry argued, rubbing his forehead in agitation. “And if you’re just trying to say it’s arbitrary, well, transfiguration writing’s arbitrary too.”

Vince grunted, glancing around in search of something. “Look, like we’re talking right now, right? ‘Cause of magic?”

“Yeah,” Harry agreed.

“It’s not like in a portrait, even though it looks like one. You’re really you, and not a picture of you,” Vince said.

“Right, okay.” Harry swallowed back a pedantic comment about how an image in a mirror was technically still a picture.

“You’re not getting me,” Vince muttered. “I can tell. I’m just trying to say, when something’s real, then if you do stuff to it, that’s real too and it really happens. I’m talking over here to you in the mirror, but the real you can hear me. If I was talking to a picture of you the real you couldn’t hear me, right? Cause the picture’s not you. Well, writing doesn’t really mean what it means. I get that when you write stuff it’s supposed to be some sounds and some word, but it’s not got anything to do with that actual word. You know? You could change what it looked like and it wouldn’t change what the word means.”

Harry was completely lost by now and necessarily sceptical. He gave it up as a bad job and said, “I don’t see how that means you shouldn’t learn to read. Books are real and when you read them you learn things.”

“Proper spellbooks teach you magic,” Vince said, “They _are_ magic, not like the things we had at school. Those are practically muggle, and worse than nothing. We don’t really learn to do magic at Hogwarts, you know, except potions. We just learn a bunch of pointless spells.”

“We’ve talked about this before, and I told you we’re learning basics so it’s easier to learn useful spells later,” Harry argued. Everything they did helped fine-tune wandwork and get them used to pronouncing incantations properly.

“Just saying spells like that, that’s not magic,” Vince argued. “A muggle could say spells and wave a wand, but it wouldn’t do them any good, would it? You’ve got to do the magic yourself, and none of the professors ever talk about how to do that. And I bet the mugglish books wouldn’t tell you how either, ‘cause they can’t. There aren’t words for that.”

Harry pressed his lips together. It was true that he had no sense of how spells actually worked. Of course it couldn’t be just the wand movement and incantation, because like Vince had said, there had to be a wizard behind them. “I suppose. And you know how to do it? Your dad taught you?”

“He’s showing me,” Vince agreed, his tone low and his face drawn.

“You don’t sound very happy about that,” Harry said.

“It’s hard. It’s not really even something you learn,” Vince murmured. “There aren’t words to explain it. You just have to keep trying until you get it. Sometimes you just know it, and sometimes it takes forever.”

Harry was briefly reminded of his own forays into more advanced magic. Reanimation and conjuration had both been like that. Of course, Petri had given him some guidance, including wand movement and incantation, but ultimately he had had to try over and over again until something somehow worked. It wasn’t that the wand-waving had been unnecessary, but that it had been insufficient—something in his head, the way he had thought, had made the real difference.

Vince glanced behind him suddenly, and the next moment Harry got a view of the ceiling again. “I’ve got to go.” Vince’s voice sounded far away. “Don’t forget about duelling club.”

Harry gave the dark rafters a sour look. “I thought you said real magic can’t be taught.”

“I said I want to know tricks, not spells,” Vince said. “Bye.”

And Harry was left to blink at his own glaring reflection. He sighed.

When Saturday evening came around, he reluctantly dragged himself to the Great Hall just before the start of duelling club, hoping that he could avoid Professor Snape’s notice. Perhaps, if he was lucky, the man wouldn’t show up at all and it would just be Lockhart flouncing around all evening. Normally that was a great disappointment, but circumstances had changed.

Professor Lockhart was indeed there already, alone, though that meant nothing, as Snape always arrived a few minutes late. Harry felt exposed without Vince’s lumbering form beside him. Ever since Goyle and Pansy had stopped coming to meetings, Harry had always partnered with Vince. Now, he was probably the sole first year in the club. The rest had been scared off by Snape’s penchant for teaching to the level of the seventh years.

“Harry! Just the Boy-Who-Lived I wanted to see,” Lockhart declared loudly, hopping off the ridiculously gilded stage and ambling in his direction. Harry swallowed a groan. Perhaps he should have arrived late after all and risked Professor Snape’s sneering instead.

Lockhart clapped him on the shoulder. “I’ve taken the liberty of scheduling our interview with a contact of mine. Excellent woman, sensational reporter. We’ll be the talk of the town. Friday the twenty-sixth of February, four o’clock in the afternoon. Mark that down.”

“Right,” Harry mumbled, resolutely making no move to write anything down. He didn’t think Lockhart could possibly let him forget. The professor flashed a conspiratorial smirk and patted him on the back.

“Are we quite finished?”

Harry’s heart sank like a stone as Professor Snape’s icy voice cut between them. Lockhart kept his composure admirably and whirled around on his heel, his white cape fluttering into Harry’s face, where it released a pungent wave of floral perfume. Harry gagged.

“My dear Professor Snape, if you’ll give us just one more moment…”

But Harry had seized the opportunity to make his escape, sprinting towards the side of the stage where the other students were milling about and diving behind a seventh year.

By the time he turned around, Professor Lockhart had been strung up in the air by his ankle and appeared to be unconscious, or at least silenced, since he wasn’t spewing any more bluster. Professor Snape lowered his wand and relaxed his shoulders minutely from their dangerous cant.

“Let’s begin. Today, I will be demonstrating several parrying techniques. A successful parry stops your opponent from completing his spell and gives you the opportunity to follow up with your own. I will require a volunteer.” Harry’s heart had a moment to pound in his throat before Snape called out, “Potter!” without even looking.

Professor Snape clearly didn’t understand the meaning of ‘volunteer’, and furthermore, Harry was pretty sure that this was exactly the role that Professor Lockhart was supposed to have served. Nonetheless, he swallowed his trepidation and climbed up onto the golden stage. A shiver passed down his spine as the collective gaze of the room settled on him like a feather-light touch.

Harry stopped just across from Snape, near the centre of the platform. They exchanged stiff bows and each stepped ten paces back, Harry remembering to take extra-large steps like they’d been shown in one of the earlier club sessions. He had the irrational worry that he might step clear off the edge of the stage, and had to force himself not to glance behind him improperly.

“On your guard,” said Snape, pivoting easily into a ready stance. Harry turned to mirror him, angling his body to provide the slimmest profile. It felt strange and awkward to have his left side in front. “Attack me.”

Harry glanced up and met coal black eyes. “ _Expelliar—_ ”

He yelped soundlessly as his incantation was cut off, his other hand automatically jumping to his throat in confusion. He shoved it away hastily as he saw its silver glint.

Snape had turned away from him in clear disregard. “The silencing spell cannot be avoided and reliably interrupts verbal casting. It can even be a decisive finisher in a duel with an opponent incapable of nonverbal casting.” he paused to sneer in Harry’s general direction, as if Harry were at fault for not knowing a sixth-year technique. “Its main advantage is that it is one of the quickest parries. Can someone tell me its disadvantages?”

Harry was dying to blurt out an answer, despite the obvious inadvisability of speaking out of turn in front of Professor Snape, but was saved by the fact that he was still silenced.

“It’s a hard spell to pull off, especially in a fight,” said Cassius. “Needs loads of concentration.”

“A fair statement, though it will pose little trouble to a competent caster. Anything else? Montague.”

Montague, who had been whispering something to Flint with a smirk on his face, paled and coughed into his hand to stall. “Well… if the opponent can do nonverbal spells, it’d just be a bit of a waste, right?”

Snape’s lips thinned. “That isn’t strictly the case, as interrupting an incantation will still certainly disrupt the spell. However, if your opponent is casting verbally in the first place, then it may be to your advantage to allow him to continue to do so. Flint—care to tell me why?”

Flint squinted at him and didn’t answer for a few moments, before he produced, “I reckon it’s easier to fight someone when they’re announcing what spells they’re casting.”

“Precisely. Forcing a nonverbal duel can make a skilled opponent more dangerous. _Finite_. Let us move to the next technique. Potter, again.”

Coughing discreetly to make sure that the silencing spell really had been lifted, Harry tried to cast the disarming charm once more. His heart leapt into his throat as he found himself flying backwards, barely managing to stay on his feet when his momentum suddenly cut out.

“The banishing charm and its opposite, the summoning charm, are easily resisted, but are often effective on an opponent who is distracted by casting their own spell. For this reason, they are considered parrying strategies rather than offensive spells in their own right. When timed correctly, a banishing spell can interrupt casting, create distance, and allow you freedom to complete your next spell. Of course, when timed incorrectly, it leaves you wide open, so it must be used with caution.”

Harry scowled. All these valuable strategies involved spells he couldn’t yet cast. It wasn’t surprising, as Snape’s instruction had advanced at an exponential pace over the previous term, but usually there was at least something for him to try. Acting as as test dummy did not count.

Cassius raised his hand, and Snape nodded towards him.

“Sir, can you use transfiguration the same way? I heard that Gwenog Jones turned the Harpies’ coach into a louse during last week’s match.”

For some reason, Flint and Montague were guffawing silently into their sleeves. Cassius turned pink.

Snape’s lips pressed into a thin line, but he didn’t sneer outright. “While human transfiguration may present an unforeseen hazard at quidditch games, it is rarely a viable strategy in a formal duel. Your target would need to be within arm’s reach and completely caught off guard for the transfiguration stand a chance of succeeding. Transfiguration is best incorporated into duelling as a strictly indirect measure, to create obstacles or projectiles from the environment.”

Professor Snape did not demonstrate any transfiguration, but instead moved to the next technique.

“Go on, Potter.”

“ _Expelliarmus!_ ” Harry shouted successfully, but nothing happened. A simple spark shot out of Professor Snape’s wand with a resounding bang. Harry eyed it in confusion—did that mean he was ‘dead’? But no, Snape stood there and regarded him in impassive silence. Harry tried again.

He blinked, disorientated as he found himself with his wand outstretched, with no memory of moving his arm. Snorts and derisive murmurs rose up around the room, sending heat crawling up his neck. He gritted his teeth, trying to claw back his focus. He was distracted. He had to not think.

Mind blank, he turned back to Professor Snape, who was holding his wand loosely at his side, as if bored.

Blinding light burst across the platform just as he shouted “ _Expelliarmus!_ ”, but Harry let the stinging in his eyes wash harmlessly through his whole body. A flash of surprise crossed Snape’s face as red light arced from Harry’s wand. The professor’s wand jerked in his hand before the spell fizzled against an invisible barrier.

“As you can see, distracting your opponent can sometimes—” he began, but Harry’s eyes widened in realisation.

“Legilimency,” he blurted. Snape had been breaking his focus with legilimency, interrupting his spell!

It had never even occurred to him that that could be possible. He hadn’t felt a thing, either, none of the pressure of the Dark Lord’s intrusive gaze, nor the racing thoughts that Barty always prompted. Professor Snape’s legilimency was seamless.

“Nonsense, Potter,” Snape spat, danger colouring his tone. He cleared his throat. “As I was saying, creating unexpected light or sound can distract your opponent and render their spell ineffective, though timing is crucial…”

Harry narrowed his eyes as Professor Snape explained the utility of basic, instantaneous spells. He was sure he hadn’t been mistaken. Timing was crucial, and Snape’s first ‘distraction’ had only come a split-second after the failed disarming charm. Harry hadn’t even seen the second distraction—because he’d been too distracted!

After the demonstration, despite his reservations, he scrambled around the side of the stage to catch up to Professor Snape.

“No, Potter,” said Snape, before he could even open his mouth.

“But—”

“Who taught you occlumency?”

Harry’s mouth snapped shut. He dithered for a moment too long, and then said, “No one.”

Professor Snape’s lip curled. “I’m sure.” Harry scrambled to blank his mind, leaping back from the churning stream of his thoughts.

“Okay, but sir, why did you…” he managed, before Snape cut him off.

“Force of habit.” He turned away sharply, his robes billowing.

Harry bit his lip and looked around the room for a partner. Everybody had already paired off and bright flashes and bangs were echoing through the hall. With a sigh, he pocketed his wand and slunk away, not in the mood to insert himself into a group. He had the tricks Vince had asked for, and Professor Snape’s unintentional lesson besides.

Of course, it wasn’t like legilimency was easy. Harry had no idea how one would go about learning it, except that obviously other people would be required to practise on, which was a long shot.

Harry paused in the doorway, breath catching in his throat as he remembered: he’d done something like legilimency before—the numbers game he’d played with Shy. And there hadn’t been any studying involved, or even practice. All he’d had to do was drink vampire blood.

He huffed, shaking his head. It wasn’t like he had a ready supply of vampire blood stashed under his bed. But there was regular blood, house-elf blood, he couldn’t help thinking. Would it work? He shook his head again to banish the ridiculous thought.


	58. Reader

Monday morning, an enormous great grey swooped low over Harry's porridge and dropped a lumpy little package onto the table with a thud. The cloth-wrapped parcel was square, about the size of his hand; Harry supposed it must be Vince's mirror. He shoved it into his pocket for later inspection, only to be greeted with yet another delivery, this one book-shaped and wrapped in the familiar brown paper from Petri's shop.

Harry snatched up the attached note, keeping a suspicious eye trained on the package as he read it.

_Dear Harry,_

_The book you requested is_ _enclosed. Be sure to write in it as soon as you can. It appears to be enchanted to return to the last person who used it, if left untouched for too long._

Harry muttered some unflattering things under his breath. So that was how Penelope had got _Bridging the Veil_ back from Ginny. He hadn't planned on actually using the book, but now it seemed like he would have no choice. It would probably be fine, right? He already knew how he was going to die, and Petri had even used it on his behalf once already.

He returned his attention to the letter, hoping that Petri had an answer for his patronus troubles.

_I have never heard of a patronus attacking its caster. Perhaps you simply require more practice, as it is a very difficult charm. Recall also that many wizards are unable to cast the charm at all. The most common reason for this failure is arrogance, as the charm requires a sincere plea for a protector, an acknowledgement of the caster's weakness. There is another possible reason, though I hesitate to lend credence to it. It is said that the form of the patronus is drawn from the caster's soul. Make of that what you will._

Harry bit his lip as a pit formed in his stomach. Could it be that because he'd made a horcrux, his soul was too distorted to form a patronus? But Petri also had a horcrux, and he could cast the charm just fine. Maybe there was something extra botched-up about Harry's. How could he possibly know? Even if he did remember exactly what he'd done, he probably still wouldn't be able to explain the metaphysical consequences.

Was there some way to check up on his own soul? If there was, Dumbledore probably knew, but Harry really did not want to put himself in a position where Dumbledore might find out about his horcrux, so he couldn't risk asking about it. His other options were also dismal. Petri certainly wouldn't tell him; he doubted there would be books about soul-related magic in the library; and the Dark Lord… well, the Dark Lord was actually looking like his best chance, which was not a good sign.

Maybe he could at least ask Dumbledore about his patronus. Like Petri had said, it was a difficult charm and plenty of adults couldn't cast it. Surely Dumbledore wouldn't connect Harry's struggle with it to the possibility that his soul was damaged. He didn't know when he'd next talk to the headmaster, however, so finally he revised his first course of action to asking Professor Flitwick. If Petri hadn't heard of a backfiring patronus before, Harry had doubts that Flitwick would be of any more help, but it didn't hurt to try.

"The patronus charm? You're the best at charms in your year, no doubt about it, but even then it's a bit more advanced than I'd recommend," Professor Flitwick told him as soon as he brought it up at office hours.

"I know, but with the dementors around the castle, I'd feel safer if I had some way of protecting myself from them. We get pretty close to the edge of the grounds at broom racing club. Are there ways besides the patronus?" Harry asked.

"There are several, but unfortunately, all of them are rather advanced magic," Professor Flitwick said, eyes crinkling apologetically. "Arguably, the most reliable method is to make yourself uninteresting to them by hiding away your memories, but that requires mastery of a rather obscure branch of mental magic that we don't teach here at Hogwarts. Some mind-altering potions can also have a similar effect, and I believe that some human transfigurations will also insulate you from the worst of the dementors' aura, but of course that's all NEWT material. As far as charms go, the patronus charm is the only effective one that I am aware of."

"Have you ever heard of the patronus charm backfiring?" Harry asked.

Professor Flitwick frowned. "It shouldn't be possible for it to backfire if cast correctly. It could go wrong, of course, with poor concentration."

"Go wrong? How?"

Flitwick shrugged. "The usual ways conjurations go wrong. Something else comes out the end of your wand."

"It's a conjuration?" Harry asked, surprised. "I suppose that makes sense. An immaterial conjuration?"

"That's right." A nod of approval.

Feeling that he had skirted around the problem enough, Harry asked, "Can it go wrong by attacking the caster?"

Professor Flitwick hesitated. "I don't believe so," he finally said, but then narrowed his eyes shrewdly. "Mr Potter, are you saying that you believe you've produced such a result?"

"I suppose I could show you," Harry said, and Professor Flitwick gestured for him to go ahead. He took a deep breath and focused on soaring. " _Expecto patronum!_ "

A ribbon of mist streamed from his wand and twisted back through the air. Harry managed to mostly avoid it, but he felt an odd frisson as it grazed his cheek.

"Fascinating," cried Professor Flitwick, before he coughed. "Pardon me. I don't mean to make light of your difficulties, but I daresay you've created a new spell behaviour."

"I—what?" Harry repeated incredulously. "It's not good spell behaviour, though. That's like saying blowing up your feather with the levitation charm is a new spell behaviour."

Professor Flitwick gave a squeaky laugh. "Oh no, Mr Potter, you see, the mist you conjured with the charm appears correct to me. It simply isn't acting as the incorporeal patronus normally should. Do you know if contact with the mist has any adverse effects?"

Harry scratched his head. "It sort of feels like a cheering charm, but really strong. It knocked me out for a moment the first time this happened. Do you think it would work on dementors, then, if I just sort of stood in it?"

"Likely not, unfortunately. It might even be counterproductive. The patronus charm is a bit of a double-edged sword. You see, it shields you from the dementors' aura, but it also acts like a beacon for them, distracting them from you so that you can escape. Thus it is most effective at some distance from you—too close, and you draw dementors straight to you rather than keeping them away," Professor Flitwick explained.

Harry winced. So even if he learned to keep his composure in the backwash of his charm, there still wouldn't be any point.

"Any idea what I might be doing wrong?" Harry asked.

"Would you mind telling me about the memory you're using?" said Professor Flitwick, so Harry told him about his memory of flying, and an edited version of his memory of success. Flitwick nodded. "I don't know if it'll help with your interesting spell behaviour, but it is normally easier to control the movement of a corporeal patronus, and to achieve that I'd advise using a memory that's more connected to other people. The sort of happiness that is best for the charm is happiness associated with security, perhaps a memory of being protected or rescued."

"Oh," Harry said. It was obvious in retrospect, but it hadn't occurred to him that there were different sorts of happiness. "Why don't the books say that?"

Professor Flitwick chuckled. "It's no hard-and-fast rule, simply something I've concluded after my own experience with the charm."

Harry smiled and thanked him, racking his brains for something to use as he departed Professor Flitwick's office. Security. His smile dimmed. He couldn't remember the last time he'd felt secure. So the patronus charm was probably not going to work. Harry was going to need to try a different route, if he didn't want to trust the fate of his soul to his meagre occlumency.

The fate of his soul. For a wild moment, he wondered if he was even in danger from the dementors at all. They couldn't kill him if he was fated to die at the Dark Lord's hand, could they?

He groaned. Technically, though, he wouldn't die from the dementor's kiss. Did one's fate rest with the soul, or something else? Maybe it was time to pay Professor Trelawney another visit. He could ask her opinion on the psychography book, too.

Harry waited until the last lessons of the day were definitely over before making the long trek up the North Tower. Fortunately, Professor Trelawney was in, reclining in an armchair and gazing into a crystal ball. She didn't look up as he entered, and Harry stood awkwardly next to the trap door, one hand still holding it open. Perhaps it was a bad time?

"Next time, my dear, ask the cards if I'm free," Professor Trelawney said.

Harry jumped, confused for a moment, before he flushed. "Right, sorry. Are you busy right now, then?"

She finally looked at him, her magnified gaze sharp. "Close the door and have a seat, dear. I've already made some time for today."

Harry picked his way carefully past the disorganised furniture and settled down on a pouffe across from the professor. There were already two cups of tea set out on the small table. He reached hesitantly for the cup in front of him and Professor Trelawney didn't say anything, so he figured it really was his.

"So, I see that you have questions for me, my dear. Ask away," Professor Trelawney said, sipping at her own tea.

"It's about fate. Do you know if someone's fate is tied to their soul or their body?" Harry asked.

Professor Trelawney gave him a considering look. "Both," she said. "More accurately, there are three parts to fate: past, present, and future. Your past lies in your memories, for they record who you have been until now. Your present is in your soul, which drives your conscious experience. Your future belongs to your body, and its inevitable decay."

Harry sat stunned for a moment as his mind reorganised everything he'd vaguely understood before. "So all future divination, that's all things that are going to happen to my body, specifically?"

Professor Trelawney swept a handful of ragged curls and clinking beads behind her ear, peering at him carefully. "My dear, to any other student I would say that the distinction is irrelevant in any practical sense. But I sense weight behind your question, so I have a question for you in turn. How do you know if a body is yours?"

Harry swallowed down an indignant reaction and forced himself to consider the question seriously, since Professor Trelawney was doing him the same courtesy. His body was his because it was the one he was using, right? But no—when the Dark Lord had used his body, that hadn't made it the Dark Lord's body.

"It's the body that my soul likes the most?" Harry tried.

Professor Trelawney snorted, covering her mouth with a gnarled, bejewelled hand. "Pardon me. You are absolutely correct, my dear. It seems that you've answered your own question, then, don't you think?"

Harry nodded, sighing internally at the confirmation that he wasn't safe from the dementor's kiss after all. The prophecy had definitely been talking about the body that he had right now (not that he'd ever had any other one), and his soul being eaten wouldn't make it any less his body.

"Well? Your next question?" Professor Trelawney prompted, and Harry had to think a moment to remember that he had, indeed, had another question.

"Can you tell me about psychography?"

"A dangerous and foolish technique," Professor Trelawney snapped immediately, eyes narrowing. "Necromancy is not something to dabble in lightly, especially not for one so young."

"I already know my fate," Harry protested, but Professor Trelawney's teacup met her saucer with a loud clink as she leaned forward gravely.

"You can never know your fate," she whispered, her eyes flashing. "No matter what you've seen, it can always get worse. Never forget. Until the moment you die, there are infinite paths before you, however narrow those infinities may seem."

Harry winced. He supposed he couldn't argue with that. Now that she'd brought it up, he could think of a dozen ways for his fate to become more explicitly gruesome.

"But what if I've got to do the psychography? Is there a safe way?" he pressed.

Professor Trelawney's face twisted into a disapproving moue, but she still answered: "There is no safe way, but at the very least, do not read your own writing. Ask somebody else, preferably somebody skilled in grammatology, to read it for you and give you general advice only. Do you know who the last student to ask me about psychography was?"

A pit of certainty formed in Harry's stomach. His mouth went dry. "Percy Weasley."

Professor Trelawney nodded once. "I warned him. I told him the same thing I have told you. Perhaps I should have done more to dissuade him. Tell me, my dear, why do you feel that you must turn to necromancy? Are you perhaps hoping to understand what happened to that poor boy? If so, retracing his path is a foolish way of going about it."

"Well, Professor, do you know anything about what he saw? Did he talk to you about it?" Harry asked.

"He did not, but I should think it clear enough why a diviner would take his own life," she said. Harry sat up straight.

"What? Why?"

"He discovered that the world would be better without him in it," Professor Trelawney said. "It's true of most diviners, you understand. The deeper you entrench yourself in arcane knowledge, the more weight your words carry, and the more woe you are destined to sow. Some people simply can't live with themselves, once they realise the price."

Harry wanted to protest that that was ridiculous. How could more knowledge possibly be unequivocally bad? Then he suddenly realised something. The prophecy.

"You—you're the one who made the prophecy about me and the Dark Lord," he blurted. He regretted the words as soon as he realised they'd come out of his mouth, out of nowhere.

Professor Trelawney blinked at him owlishly. Harry stared back at her, uncertain what to say, or if he should apologise for the random outburst.

"Don't be absurd," she finally said, affecting a strangely light tone. She even chuckled, and fanned at herself with her hand. "I certainly wouldn't presume to predict anything about He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named."

Flummoxed by this response, Harry doubled down. "I saw you—well, a recording of you—come out of an orb that was filed at the Department of Mysteries."

The harmless, avuncular smile slid from Professor Trelawney's face like water, and Harry's heart jumped into his throat.

"I see," she said stonily. "Well then, I'm terribly sorry, my dear. You haven't repeated it to anybody, have you?"

Harry shook his head. "Of course not."

"Good. Make certain you never do. Again, my apologies and condolences," she said, as if he were about to drop dead in the next few minutes. Harry rubbed the back of his neck uncomfortably.

"It's all right. Oh, wait, there was one line that I—mmph."

Professor Trelawney had launched herself across the table and shoved her bony hand against his mouth.

"Anybody includes me," she said, only releasing him once he'd managed to attempt a nod.

"Sorry, Professor. I didn't realise you… don't know it?"

"Prophets do not remember their own prophecies. It's better for everyone that way. You understand, right, dear?" she said, staring at him meaningfully as she sat back down. Harry nodded.

"Yes, sorry. That does make sense." He decided to change the subject back. "So… if I did psychography, could you help me read it?"

Professor Trelawney huffed. "You are persistent, aren't you, Mr Potter? Very well. Better I do it than allow you to doom some other poor soul. Go get the psychic parchment from back there, won't you?" She gestured to the chest of drawers next to the china cabinet with the spare tea sets.

"I've got this psychography book," Harry said, carefully disgorging _Bridging the Veil_ from his pocket without touching it. He wasn't sure why he bothered, seeing as he had held it before to no ill effect, and was also imminently about to write in it.

"That is not psychic parchment," Professor Trelawney hissed, recoiling from the table. "It's _human_ parchment."

Harry choked. "What?"

"Where did you get that?"

"It's a long story. But Percy had it at one point," Harry said. "What do you mean, 'human parchment'? Like parchment made of human skin?"

"Yes, exactly that," Professor Trelawney muttered. "Far more effective than regular psychic parchment, but its creation is considered dark magic. It was banned ages ago, so surviving specimens are rare. Surely you can see the miasma of death dripping from the pages?"

Harry squinted, and even tried taking off his glasses and wiping off nonexistent dust, to no avail.

"With your inner eye, dear."

Harry was still uncertain how the inner eye corresponded to literally seeing anything, so he tried closing his regular eyes and focusing his attention towards where he knew the book lay. A few awkward moments later, he had to admit that he couldn't feel or see anything, before he tricked himself into thinking that the cartoonish black cloud buzzing around in his mind's eye was more than imaginary.

"My dear, have you seen death before?" Professor Trelawney asked.

Harry opened his eyes. "Like seen somebody die? Yes."

"Well then. Perhaps it has made you insensitive to such comparatively meagre manifestations. No matter. Do you have a quill?"

"Wait, Dumbledore had this for a while. How come he didn't notice it was made of human skin?" Harry demanded.

Trelawney scoffed. "Dumbledore? He wouldn't understand even if a grinning skeleton limped out of a coffin right in front of him and offered him a wager! He's a great wizard, no doubt, but blind to the danger of death."

Harry blinked, unsure if he would understand such a strange phenomenon either. "Right," he muttered, taking out a quill. "So I just write in it?"

Professor Trelawney snatched up the book and flipped through it before Harry could warn her. She nodded to herself. "Have you read the instructions?"

"There are instructions?" Harry blurted. She gave him an unimpressed look and passed the book back across the table. Harry picked it up and flipped past the title page.

'A Brief History of Psychography,' read the heading. Right. It was an actual book, which he supposed made more sense than if it were just a random sheaf of human parchment bound together. After the brief history section, there were, indeed, instructions.

_1\. Sit or recline comfortably in a quiet location._

_2\. Open this book to a fresh page and set the tip of your quill to the parchment._

_3\. Clear your mind of all things but the focus of your divination._

_4\. Close your eyes and breathe deeply. As you inhale, invite the spirits of the dead into your body. As you exhale, channel their will through your soul._

"How am I supposed to 'invite the spirits of the dead'?" Harry asked.

"Just focus on breathing, dear, and keep an open inner eye. The parchment will do the rest," Professor Trelawney assured him.

Harry took a deep breath, flipped to the end of the book for a blank page, and poised his quill as if to write. He concentrated on Percy.

"Close your eyes," Professor Trelawney reminded him.

The next thing he knew, she was trying to pry the book out of his hands, with little success—his silver hand was clamped around it like a vice. As he came to, he yelped and let go, shoving the errant hand in his pocket.

"Goodness," Professor Trelawney murmured, smoothing out a crease in the page. She studied it with a frown. "Would I be correct in saying that your birthday's in midwinter, my dear? December or January?"

"Er, no. It's in July," he said.

She glanced up sharply. "Really?" she said. "You don't strike me as a summer child at all."

Child of summer—Harry remembered suddenly the divining that Petri had done for him. He had the urge to snatch the book back out of Trelawney's hands, but managed to restrain himself by actively leaning away. He could look at it later. He felt immediately foolish at the thought. Of course he shouldn't look at it at all.

"What do you mean?" Harry asked.

"Dark hair, slight stature, tragedy in your past, tragedy in your future, lonely, and touched by death—hallmarks of the heart of winter. Poor Percival Weasley, on the other hand, was a summer child indeed. Bright, tall, a carefree and loving childhood, the expectation of a brilliant future—all the right signs, but no amount of good auspices can save someone who wilfully dives into death's grasp."

"If that's how it works, why would anybody have kids in winter?" Harry asked, a little offended that a professor had basically called him short and sad.

Professor Trelawney snorted. "If everybody were sensible like that, my dear, we'd be out of business. Now, there's quite a bit more here than I expected. My word, this is unpleasantly direct. Mr Weasley's passing appears to have had a significant impact on your fate. Were you close?"

"No, not really," Harry said, a little concerned now. "What do you mean a significant impact?"

"Do not ask me for details, my dear. I have agreed to read for you precisely to shield you from them," Professor Trelawney admonished.

"Right," Harry muttered. "Actually, I'm not sure I understand, Professor. If you read it, won't it still come true?"

"Oh, certainly, but it is far less likely to come true in the worst possible way," Professor Trelawney said. "You must understand, my dear, that few are wise or patient enough to stand back and allow a terrible fate to befall them. You might think yourself one of them, but when the time comes, who can say whether you will falter? Better not give yourself the opportunity, I say."

Harry nodded pensively, shoving down the burning urge to know. Professor Trelawney was right. He knew that reacting against divination was almost always a very bad idea, and he really wasn't sure whether he would be able to stop himself, if it turned out he had divined something explicitly awful.

"All right, Professor. But when you said that his fate impacted mine, you don't mean that it actually _changed_ my fate?" he asked.

"Of course not. There's no changing someone's fate," Professor Trelawney said sternly.

Harry frowned. But necromancy _could_ change fates. It was dark magic, of course, changing people's memories and souls, but it was possible. His frown deepened. If fate was past, present, and future, and you changed the past and present… a chill crawled down his spine. Maybe Professor Trelawney was right. Maybe you couldn't change someone's fate. But you could change who someone was, and then they would have someone else's fate, wouldn't they?

It wasn't something he could ask without looking suspicious, so Harry turned his thoughts back to Percy. "I read in a book that killing yourself can make it impossible for some things you saw to happen. Like if you were supposed to kill someone else, but you died beforehand."

Professor Trelawney snorted. "Hardly. That very premise is dreadfully flawed. It's an impossible situation, my dear. You cannot have divined that you would kill someone if, in fact, it never happens."

Harry could have hit himself. "Oh. So in a situation like that, that means you misinterpreted the cards, or words, or whatever?"

Professor Trelawney nodded curtly. "Just so. You should take care with what sources you consult, dear. Some half-wit diviners mistake their own ineptitude for some fundamental flaw in divination. Although, perhaps you misinterpreted the text. It's impossible for a diviner to see themselves do some explicit task and then avoid doing it, but it's true that when a diviner dies, some threads of fate die with them. Things that they alone saw and never shared with another soul. But it's quite rare for any of these things to involve important events, you understand. If poor Percival saw anything of note, anything that he might have gone to such tragic lengths to prevent, it's highly unlikely that nobody else has seen those same things, unfortunately."

Harry frowned. "Professor, have you seen any bad things coming soon, then?"

"My dear, I only see bad things," Professor Trelawney said. "But yes, the portents have been very troubling lately. They speak of great change on the horizon, a dangerous shift in forces." She sighed and rubbed her temples. "In truth, it is serious enough that I've tried to warn the headmaster, but he'll hear nothing of it. Of course he won't. If there were anything he could do to prevent what is coming, then we would not know of its coming at all."

"So is there never anything we can do about what we see?" Harry asked. "It's all… predetermined?"

"No, no, far from it, my dear," Professor Trelawney assured him. "You must understand that there is always far more of what we don't see than what we do see. Focusing on what cannot be changed is a snare that sometimes catches even the most experienced diviners, but in truth it is in the unknown spaces in between the known that we can do good to counteract the bad. It isn't easy, certainly. If you want to understand how to use divination to guide your actions, I would recommend an excellent book by Cassandra Vablatsky. _A Primer to Contingent Reading_ , it's called."

"Oh. I've heard of it. Thanks, Professor," said Harry, recalling the title. It was one of the books Penelope had checked out, the one she had picked to read herself. Perhaps she'd found something to jog her memory?

"Very good, dear." Professor Trelawney returned _Bridging the Veil_ to Harry, though not before tearing out the page on which he'd written and reminding him sternly not to write in it again without her. Harry promised and thanked her again, before heading straight for the common room, hoping that Penelope was at her carrel.

She was there, but when he brought up the book, she sucked in a breath through her teeth and shook her head.

"Sorry, Harry, I haven't looked at it yet. I really haven't had any time." She gestured to her desk, which was covered in scrolls and library books. "Babbling just unloaded a whole new alphabet on us, and I'm up to my neck in Arithmancy with representation theory. I swear, I've been looking at the same problem for a week straight and I have no idea how to even start. There's a reason I decided not to try cramming NEWT Divination into my schedule. But here, you can read the book if you've got the time."

She grabbed _A Primer to Contingent Reading_ from the shelf above her desk and pressed it into his arms.

"This is NEWT Divination?" Harry asked, eyeing the heavy volume with trepidation. Penelope shrugged.

"We didn't cover anything about contingent reading in OWLs, so it's got to be, right? Sorry." She bit her lip. "I shouldn't expect you to just be able to pick that up. The arithmancy did say that I was supposed to read it. I'll try to make some time." She moved to take it back, but Harry shook his head.

"It's all right. I can try looking at it," he said.

"Did you already finish the other one?" Penelope asked. Harry nodded.

"I even asked Professor Trelawney about it, and she basically told me it was wrong," he said, sighing. "Although, even if what's in there isn't true, that doesn't mean Percy didn't believe it."

Maybe Percy had died for nothing. Harry pressed his lips together. He couldn't possibly tell Ginny that, could he, that Percy had made a mistake? But would lying about it be any better?

Well, he didn't know the truth for sure yet; there was still work to do. He would read Penelope's book and take a look through _Bridging the Veil_ as well. It was probably safe now that his own page had been removed, though he wasn't sure how he was going to determine which entries had been made by Percy. His original perusal had shown him that previous users of the book had not bothered using the blank pages in order.

"They can't all be wrong. He had all three of those books," Penelope said. "I asked Madam Pince. He had those ones checked out, and I went and I checked them out after… you know. The thing is, I can't find any of my notes. It's weird. I must have taken notes if I read them, so maybe I didn't get around to actually reading them?"

She sounded sceptical about the possibility. Harry frowned, glancing at her desk, which was covered with parchment rolls and books.

"Maybe they just got lost?"

Penelope followed his gaze and sighed. "Yeah, probably. That sucks." She winced and tapped the parchment she had been writing on. "I've really got to finish this translation. It's due tomorrow. Let me know if you find anything. Sorry."

Harry nodded and left her in peace, making his way upstairs to stash the book for later. He couldn't exactly blame Penelope for not having time to read it; between his own extracurriculars and homework, Harry was finding himself strapped for free time as well. Still, he couldn't just drop the matter. They were close. He could feel it. The answer might literally be at his fingertips—he just had to find what Percy had written.

"You actually got it," Ginny said flatly when he presented her with the book later that day. They were down in the kitchens again, enjoying a late-night snack. It wasn't quite curfew yet, but Harry was cognisant of the time like a little itch on the back of his neck.

"Told you I would," said Harry. "I need your help figuring out which pages are Percy's. You know his handwriting, right?"

Ginny shrugged. "Maybe. I could see if I can match it to something. I probably have some old essays that he helped me with."

Harry was leery of handing the book over, but he supposed Ginny knew the dangers. "Be careful," he said. "Don't write in it."

She rolled her eyes. "I'm not daft."

"No, I mean, it might try to make you write in it, so you have to pay attention. Maybe don't keep any quills nearby. You should be careful about reading the predictions in there too," Harry cautioned.

"How am I supposed to check the handwriting if I don't read it? And what, is reading it going to make it come true?" Ginny asked.

Harry took a moment to think. "I suppose not," he finally said. They were Percy's fateful words, and Percy was already dead. "Never mind. I'll keep reading the other books he had checked out, see if I can figure out what he was trying to do."

"I thought you already figured it out? He was trying to prevent something bad from happening."

Harry bit his lip. "Well, yes. But I'm not sure why he thought it would work."

"It better have at least worked," Ginny muttered darkly. "I suppose we'll know it did, if nobody else dies horribly this year."

"Young master and miss, it is being nearly time for bed," said Nelly as she took away the empty biscuit plate between them.

"Thanks Nelly," Harry said, getting to his feet. He turned back to Ginny. "Don't panic if the book vanishes after a few days. Apparently it's spelled to go back to the last user, so it'll come back to me. That's how Penelope got it back the first time."

Ginny grimaced. "Great."

They walked upstairs together, splitting to go in opposite directions at the seventh floor landing. Harry sighed. He hadn't even started the essay for Lockhart that was due tomorrow. Granted, it was just a few questions on all the accolades Lockhart had got for his defeat of the Bandon Banshee, so he didn't expect it to be difficult, but it was still standing between him and his bed.

The thought of Lockhart reminded him that he had his interview for _Witch Weekly_ coming up. He groaned. Part of him was horrified and didn't want to think about it, while another part of him was strangely nervous and wanted to prepare, as if for an exam.

In the end, he shoved it into the back of his mind up until the day of the interview, whereupon he spent the whole morning dreading what was to come. He was so distracted that he botched his formula in Transfiguration and turned his porcupine into a pine cone instead of pin cushion. By the time he realised he was not casting the same spell as everybody else, it was too late, and Professor McGonagall had assigned him extra homework.

His last lesson of the day was, of course, Defence. Harry hung back reluctantly after the lesson while Lockhart rearranged his complete works on his desk so that they stood up in a row, smiling covers on full display.

"Just one moment, Harry. We'll need to stop by my office," Lockhart said, sweeping over to the door and gesturing for Harry to precede him with a flourish. He was dressed a tad more flamboyantly than usual, Harry thought, in a navy blue pinstriped cloak over fitted robes. On his perfectly coiffed hair sat a matching cavalier hat adorned with a peacock feather.

They did not actually go inside his office. Instead, Lockhart stopped in front of the large mirror that had been installed on the door and began casting spells at his face. Harry didn't see anything actually change, but the mirror giggled in delight.

"Ready, Harry?" Lockhart asked after several minutes of primping, turning and flashing a wide smile. Harry glanced to the door behind him in some confusion.

"We aren't having the interview here?"

"Oh no, with all the protections, it would've been far too much trouble to get my contact up into the castle unnoticed. We'll be meeting her halfway," Lockhart explained.

"Outside the school?" Harry asked as they descended the grand stair. "Is that allowed?"

"Not outside the grounds, just outside the castle. And 'allowed' is an interesting word, Harry. One must ask, allowed by whom? With what authority? Let's just say that what the powers that be don't know won't hurt them," Lockhart whispered, though not particularly quietly.

At this point, Harry had the brief thought that Professor Lockhart might be leading him into the forest to murder him, but decided that if it came down to it, he could take the man. The chance that the Dark Lord was actively focusing on Lockhart at this very moment was small, and Harry was pretty sure that if he cast the imperius curse now, he would be able to overcome the Dark Lord's passive control.

He was careful to stand completely behind Lockhart, so that the professor would have to turn all the way around to get a good shot at him. But he needn't have worried—it soon became clear that Professor Lockhart was actually taking him towards what used to be Hagrid's hut. He was gesticulating wildly and rambling on about his own experience with being featured in _Witch Weekly_ , none of which appeared particularly relevant to Harry, seeing as it largely involved hairstyle and fashion choices.

Harry patted at his own flyaway hair self-consciously. He'd never really paid much attention to it, except to note that no amount of combing or wetting kept it down.

"My hair won't be a problem, will it?" he asked. He was probably going to get laughed at for showing up in the magazine at all; he didn't want to give people even more ammunition.

Lockhart paused and glanced back. "I wouldn't worry. It gives you a roguish look, and the ladies love that! Though of course, you'd look quite fetching with a tamer style too, to bring out your academic side."

"I don't think my hair can get tame," Harry muttered.

"Nonsense!" Lockhart cried, gesturing wildly, "A generous dollop of Sleakeazy's and you'll be all set. It was invented by a Potter, you know."

Harry had no idea what Sleakeazy's was supposed to be, but Lockhart's comment brought light to something Harry hadn't even known he hadn't known. There were other Potters—probably not any who were alive, but ancestors, at least. It was obvious, in retrospect, that that had to be true, but it had seemed irrelevant before. He had never considered that his family might be well-known.

They made it to Hagrid's hut without incident. From the front, it looked almost the same as it had the one time he, Neville, and Hermione had come to practise their growing charms, but the aesthetic was completely different. Now the dirt and cobwebs made it look dingy instead of rustic, and the darkened windows gaped as forbiddingly as the tangle of forest looming just beyond the fence.

Lockhart knocked gingerly on the door. He seemed to wince reflexively with every rap of his knuckles, though they barely made contact with the rough wood. A shadow moved in the window, and then there was the rattling of a deadbolt. The door swung wide open to reveal a witch nearly as brightly clad as Lockhart. She clashed terribly with him in her flowing magenta robes, her pale face and even paler hair reminding Harry uncannily of one of Sanguini's dolls.

"You're late, Gilderoy," she said, inspecting her claw-like, fuchsia nails.

"I'm never late, Rita dear," Lockhart said with an exaggerated wink. "Don't complain. I've brought you our rising star."

He grabbed Harry's shoulders and shuffled him forward, and Harry tried his best not to flush as he met Rita's piercing gaze.

"Harry Potter." She rolled the syllables across her tongue, as if trying to taste them. "Lovely to finally meet you in person. Rita Skeeter, at your service."

She held out her right hand, deliberately, Harry thought, and he decided it was probably all right to use his silver one, to avoid being awkward. It wasn't as if he hadn't shaken people's hand with it multiple times already. Despite his attempts to reassure himself, a sting of guilt still lanced through him.

"Nice to meet you. Thanks for, er, coming all the way here," Harry said. 'And possibly trespassing,' he thought to himself.

Rita grinned sharply. "Thank _you_ , Harry, dear, for agreeing to talk. Now, let's get comfortable. Have a seat, both of you. Don't worry, Gilderoy, I've dusted everything off."

Harry levered himself up onto one of the roughly-hewn chairs around the table, whose edge came almost up to Harry's chin. Lockhart remained standing, making a show of looking around.

"Where's that colleague of yours, Bozo, was it?"

"You'll have to do without him today. It was hard enough getting just little old me past the security around here," Rita said, waving her hand. "Dementors, you know."

"I was hoping for a full front cover feature," Lockhart sighed, striking a demonstrative pose.

"Don't worry. We'll take a memory snap for the photo. Harry, you won't mind if I use a Quick-Quotes Quill, will you? That way I can talk to you without stopping to make notes," said Rita, extracting a large, acid-green quill from an equally green, scaly handbag at her side. She put the quill to her lips, sucking on the tip, before flattening out a roll of parchment and poising the quill as if to write. When she let go, it hovered in place. "Testing, testing. My name is Rita Skeeter, journalist."

The quill flew across the page: 'Intrepid investigative journalist Rita Skeeter, forty-one, whose ferocious quill has illuminated numerous sordid secrets—'

"Lovely," Rita concluded, stopping the quill with a tap and ripping off the top of the parchment with a sweep of her talons. "So, Harry, could you tell me a bit about yourself? How do you like Hogwarts? What's your favourite school subject?"

Harry opened his mouth to respond, but paused when he saw that the Quick-Quotes Quill was already writing: 'A small, dark-haired boy, delicate features marred by a hideous lightning-bolt scar, sits in a clunky chair that completely dwarfs him. Shy and misty-eyed, he—'

"Ignore the quill, dear," said Rita, and Harry reluctantly tore his eyes away from the lurid purple prose spilling onto the page at speed. He wondered desperately how it worked.

"Right. Hogwarts is nice. I've made some friends here," he stammered, feeling himself flushing. He took a deep breath. "My favourite subject is charms."

Lockhart gasped and put a hand to his chest. "Not defence?"

Harry coughed. He wasn't sure he could bring himself to lie and say that he enjoyed Lockhart's travesty of a lesson plan. Thinking quickly, he said, "Sorry, sir, but my uncle's an enchanter, so I've got a soft spot for charms. And charms are very useful for defence, too."

"Of course! I remember your uncle," Lockhart said, and Harry froze, his heart suddenly pounding in his chest. "Met him at a book signing. Nice chap."

Harry relaxed minutely when he realised that Lockhart was just spouting nonsense. Petri hadn't even been in the same building during Lockhart's book signing.

Rita was nodding. "I can already see that you're living up to your house's studious reputation. Just lovely. Have your studies been impacted by recent tragic events? How are you adjusting to your new disability?"

"Er…"

"Are you still able to keep up with schoolwork? Have your teachers been supportive?"

"It's been fine," Harry said, trying to stopper the flow of questions. "I'm learning to cast with my left hand."

Rita raised a pencilled eyebrow. "Are you? That's lovely. Readers love a tough survivor. Of course, that's not surprising coming from the Boy-Who-Lived. Do you think the trauma in your past has prepared you to face hardships better than your fellow students?"

"I'm not sure about that," Harry muttered, but Rita was already forging ahead.

"You were at Hogwarts during the conflagration last spring, as well as the structural collapse in the fall that severely injured a student, right? Have any of these events made you feel unsafe at Hogwarts?"

"Well, that was me, so a bit, I suppose," Harry muttered.

Rita blinked, looking genuinely taken aback. "Sorry? Do you mean to say that you were the student injured in the collapse?"

Harry nodded. A shark-like grin of delight spread across Rita's face. "Quite a coincidence. Do you believe it was a deliberate attack?"

"Well, yes," said Harry.

"And was the perpetrator caught and punished?" asked Rita.

Harry shook his head.

"My word! It seems the staff have been derelict in their duties. Gilderoy, what do you have to say to that?" She glanced sharply over to Lockhart, and Harry let out a small sigh of relief at the pause in questioning.

"It was a heinous piece of dark magic for sure," Lockhart invented, "Certainly nothing a student could have managed. I don't want to point any fingers, but some of my colleagues have rather chequered pasts, quite unlike my own illustrious record. Albus won't hear a word against his favourites, naturally, so my hands have been tied."

Rita waved her hand encouragingly. "Tell me more."

Lockhart feigned reluctance for a few moments before he said, "As you might know, Severus Snape is a Death Eater…"

Snape was what? Harry's head whipped up incredulously, but Lockhart didn't pay him any mind. Was it true? He cursed Lockhart for being such an untrustworthy source. He couldn't outright believe what the man said, but this wasn't a claim that he could just discount as a wild fabrication either, not when Professor Snape's own weird behaviour might be explained by it.

Then again, Professor Snape was the one who had made the potion for his hand. Why would he have helped save Harry if he wanted him dead? Perhaps he was in on the Dark Lord's true plan? Or perhaps he hadn't saved Harry at all—what if his hand could have been healed, but Snape had purposely failed? Harry's stomach dropped.

"…Then there's Filius Flitwick—I've got nothing against the chap, but rumour has it that he's part-goblin. He certainly looks it."

"Nasty," said Rita, pulling a face. "Dumbledore's got a track record of employing dangerous non-humans. I've been saying for years that he's not fit to be in charge of our children's safety. And now a student's died under his watch, and none of the investigation details have been released. Harry, how do you feel about that? Were you close to the victim?"

They were talking about Percy now? Harry scrambled for something to say. "We weren't close, but I did know him." He looked down at his feet and caught a glimpse of the Quick-Quotes Quill out of the corner of his eye—it had populated at least two feet of scroll with dense prose by now.

"Do you believe it was a suicide as Dumbledore has been telling everyone, or do you think there could have been foul play involved?" Rita asked.

Harry tensed, wondering if he ought to say anything. But this was a chance to help Percy's family, wasn't it?

"Both," he said.

Rita raised her eyebrows. "Both?"

Harry took a moment compose his response, then said, "He had this divination artefact. I think he might have killed himself to stop what he saw from happening."

"What makes you say that? You said you weren't close, didn't you?" said Rita.

"I know his sister," Harry said vaguely.

"Tell me more about this artefact. It tells the future, you said? Where does a Hogwarts student get his hands on such a powerful object?"

Harry explained that Ginny had found it and given it to Percy, not knowing what it was. He didn't mention Lucius Malfoy, as he could not think of any concrete evidence implicating him. A satisfied smile flickered across Rita's face as he described how they'd recovered the artefact from Penelope, though he took care not to mention her name.

"Certainly doesn't sound like something a student should be handling, does it?" Rita glanced to Lockhart, who shook his head emphatically.

"Tragic, just tragic," he sighed. "If I had known…"

"I'm sure it wasn't your fault, Gilderoy," said Rita, lowering her voice. "The safety and comfort of the students in their daily lives ought to be the responsibility of their heads of house. Harry, do you think this tragedy could've been prevented, had the head of Gryffindor been less negligent in her duties? And what of the head of Ravenclaw? Would you agree that it shouldn't have fallen to a younger student like you to report on the health of your peers?"

Harry mumbled something noncommittal, but Rita seemed to take it as agreement.

"And the headmaster, of course, has final responsibility for the quality of staff he hires and the rules he puts into place, don't you think?"

"Absolutely," Lockhart said.

"Professor Dumbledore couldn't have done anything about it," Harry objected, frowning. This was the second time Rita had brought up Dumbledore, and he was beginning to think that she had an agenda.

"What's your relationship with the headmaster?" Rita asked him, pivoting suddenly.

Harry's frown deepened. "I'm not sure what you mean. He's the headmaster. I go to the school."

He did sort of know what Rita was trying to get at, but Harry hardly thought he had a true personal relationship with Dumbledore—he was more like a subject of interest, or an associate in the business of discovering what the Dark Lord was up to.

"Is that all?" Rita pressed. "He hasn't paid you any special attention? You're the Boy-Who-Lived, after all."

Harry was suddenly cognisant of the fact that Lockhart could know about his meetings with Professor Dumbledore, and therefore anybody else might know as well. Not wanting to be caught in an obvious lie, Harry said, "Well, he was a friend of my parents, so he's told me some stories about them over tea. That's all."

"Do you remember your parents?" Rita asked.

"No," Harry said, wondering why that was relevant.

"How do you think they would feel about the dangers you've faced at school? Do you think they would be worried?"

"I don't know. Probably?" Harry mumbled.

"What about your guardians? Your uncle, was it?"

Harry shrugged. He supposed Petri really had been worried about him after Halloween. It was a strange thought. To his relief, Rita seemed abruptly to tire of this line of questioning and turned to grill Lockhart instead.

Predictably, Lockhart began spouting complete lies about giving Harry extra tutoring and accommodating him in duelling club—as if he even spent any of that time conscious. The image of Snape instantly felling Lockhart each time was less funny, however, now that there was a possibility that Snape might be working for the Dark Lord.

Then again, what was the problem? Lockhart was technically working for the Dark Lord too. And for that matter, so was Harry. A better question to ask was who _wasn't_ working for the Dark Lord in some capacity or other. Harry sighed, gaze wandering over to the Quick-Quotes Quill, which was dutifully recording the scene.

"…Gilderoy flashes his award-winning smile, dashing enough to make any young witch swoon, and this reporter is no exception. The dingy atmosphere only enhances his stunning features…"

Scratch that. There wasn't a single word of what Lockhart had said in the past five minutes, just paragraphs upon paragraphs detailing his appearance. Harry choked on a surprised giggle, glancing up at Rita's face. Her eyes were fixed on Lockhart and she nodded every so often, a placid smirk on her lips.

Did the quill write down what Rita was thinking? But how did that work?

Perhaps sensing his gaze, Rita looked down herself and quickly snatched the quill away, letting the parchment spring up into a loose roll.

"Well, you've given me quite a bit to work with today. I think it's about time I take my leave, before I overstay my welcome," she said. "Gilderoy, would you be a dear and escort me to the gates? Harry, it was lovely to meet you. I hope you'll be open to further contact in the future. I also write for the _Daily Prophet,_ you know. Plenty of opportunities for publicity there."

Harry slid from his seat, nodding awkwardly as Lockhart threaded his arm around Rita's elbow.

"Back to the castle with you, Harry, my boy," said Lockhart with a jaunty wave as they marched out of the hut.

Harry made directly for the library. Lockhart had mentioned Snape being a Death Eater as if it were common knowledge, so there would have to be some record about it somewhere.

As he entered the library from the lower entrance, Harry spotted Hermione in the corner, bent over a hefty tome. Perfect. He headed straight for her table.

"Hey, Hermione. What are you reading?"

She wrinkled her nose at the interruption, though her expression smoothed when she glanced up. "Oh. Hi Harry. I'm reading about the goblin tenets of ownership and the major cultural misunderstandings leading up to each rebellion. Did you know that Urgot Lashnail is still alive?"

Harry blinked, rummaging through the dark recesses of his mind to bring up all the useless facts he'd memorised for History of Magic. "That's Urg the Unclean?" If he recalled correctly, Urg the Unclean was the one who had started the rebellion of seventeen fifty-two, after getting dunked in a pond by wizards when he trespassed on their land while covered in muck that had allegedly contained a fortune's worth of gold dust.

Hermione nodded.

"So he'd be what, like two hundred forty?" Harry asked. "Goblins can live to a thousand, right?"

"They can, but it's really rare, because of all the fighting they do," said Hermione. "I sort of assumed he'd been executed at the end of the rebellion, but no, it says here that Minister Gore agreed to extend section thirty-nine of the sixteen twelve treaty, allowing goblins to employ wizards to retrieve objects, instead of requiring them to be independent contractors. None of that's in our history text, is it? All it says is that Hephaestus Gore put down the rebellion."

"Yeah," Harry agreed, figuring that Hermione know would know best what was or wasn't in their textbooks.

"But Harry, don't you realise what this means? Urg the Unclean is still alive, and he remembers what actually happened. So why aren't we reading first-hand accounts? I looked all over, and there aren't any."

Harry shrugged. "Maybe he didn't feel like writing things down. Or maybe he wrote things down for goblins but we don't know about them since goblins aren't allowed in wizarding areas. Did we have an essay for History?"

"Oh, no. I'm just doing some research for fun," said Hermione. Harry glanced over to the book, which featured ant-sized print and was thicker than his arm.

"Right. Since you read a lot about history, I was wondering, do you know if there's somewhere I can get the names of all the Death Eaters? The known ones, I mean."

Hermione scrunched up her face. " _Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts_ definitely mentions You-Know-Who's most notorious followers, but I don't remember there being a comprehensive list…. Oh! Can't you just check one of the wanted posters from the Azkaban breakout?"

"But was that all of them?" Harry pressed. "What about Death Eaters who didn't go to prison?"

"If we know about them, that means they got caught, right?" said Hermione.

Harry bit his lip. "Is it actually illegal to just be a Death Eater? It can't be, right?"

"Hm good point," Hermione murmured, brows knitting together. She suddenly sprang up like her chair was on fire and ran for the stacks.

Harry sat down next to her vacated seat and propped his head on his elbow to wait. He thought he should feel a little bad about sending Hermione to do the hard work for him, but she had volunteered, after all, and rather enthusiastically at that.

He changed his mind when she returned hugging a single enormous tome to her chest. She had to bend forward to set it on the table, and still it made a heavy thunk as she pulled her arms out from underneath it. Harry peered at the title: _Procedures of the Wizengamot_ , by Legatus Crouch.

"Don't worry," Hermione said when she caught his expression, "I've already read it. I just need to check something."

She flipped rapidly through the nearly translucent pages as Harry sat in dumbfounded silence. When could she have possibly found the time for that much extracurricular studying?

"Look, here it is," she whispered, tugging Harry's sleeve. "I think you're right, that not all the Death Eaters went to prison. This is a case where the accused claimed to have been under the imperius curse. That's a mind-control curse, I think. Horrible stuff. It says here that you can still be prosecuted for certain crimes, like murder, even if you were under the imperius, but the accused was determined not to have been involved in any such crimes, and thus exonerated."

Harry scanned the page while Hermione whispered the details in his ear. His jaw dropped when he spotted the name of the accused: Lucius Malfoy. He knew for a fact that Malfoy was an actual Death Eater. He might well have been under the imperius curse—Harry was more and more certain that his hypothesis about the Dark Lord putting everybody under it was correct—but Malfoy had definitely followed the Dark Lord out of his own free will.

"…So you're right that there must be more known Death Eaters than just the ones who escaped from Azkaban," Hermione was saying. "Why do you need a full list, anyway?"

Harry bit his lip. "I heard someone was a Death Eater, someone who definitely wasn't in prison, and I wanted to check if it was true."

"What's their name?" Hermione asked.

Harry winced. "It's Professor Snape."

"What?" Hermione demanded. "That can't be true. They wouldn't let him teach if it was. Who told you that?"

"Professor Lockhart," Harry said. Hermione frowned, sitting back down slowly.

"Well, if it really is true, it has to be a matter of public record," she muttered after a while.

"Would there be a case like that one?" Harry asked, gesturing to the law book.

"Probably, but I don't know where you could find it. Penelope might know," Hermione said.

"Penelope?" Harry repeated in surprise.

"She's the one who showed me this book. I think she wants to go into law after Hogwarts," Hermione explained.

"Oh. And you're interested in law, too?" Harry asked.

Hermione glanced away. "You can't tell anyone, but I might have accidentally started a black market."

Harry's jaw dropped. "You what?"

A flustered Hermione related how Professor McGonagall had caught her peddling muggle planners and pens and marched her straight to the headmaster for a stern talking-to. Apparently, using wizarding currency to purchase muggle-made items, or abetting such an act, was strictly illegal. Wizards were only allowed to obtain muggle artefacts as gifts, or by paying for them with muggle money that they had earned from muggles. The penalty for adults was a hefty fine, but Hermione had got off with just a warning.

"But now other people are doing it too," she muttered, burying her face in her hands. "I tried to explain that it's illegal, that I was wrong for doing it, but nobody will listen to me, and when I told Professor McGonagall they just denied everything and I had no proof."

Somewhat amused, Harry asked, "Why is it illegal, anyway?"

Hermione gestured to the book she had originally been reading. "It's all got to do with how goblins define wealth. When you exchange a galleon for something, something magical apparently happens to the galleon, though I'm not sure I fully understand what. But it only works if you're paying for something made with magic, or for someone to do something with magic."

This was the first time Harry had heard any of this. He rummaged around in his pockets and produced a sickle, eyeing it sceptically.

"It's goblin magic. I don't think wizards really know much about it," Hermione said, shrugging. She pursed her lips. "Oh no, I know what you're thinking. You can't just go ask Professor Flitwick just because he's part-goblin."

Harry went to ask Professor Flitwick the next chance he got.

"Sir, can you do any goblin magic?" was what he asked. A strange look came over the professor's lined face.

"Fortunately not, or I wouldn't be sitting here in front of you," was his answer.

Harry blinked. "I don't understand, sir."

Professor Flitwick sighed, pressing his fingertips together. "Are you familiar with the Code of Wand Use?"

"You mean the wand ban on non-humans?" said Harry. "I thought part-humans don't count."

"Yes, that's Clause Three of the Code. Do you know what distinguishes non-humans from part-humans under that clause?" Professor Flitwick asked.

Harry shook his head. The thought occurred to him now that vampires were generally considered part-human when it came to other laws that Ness liked to complain about, but non-human under the wand ban.

Professor Flitwick leaned forward in his seat. "There is a fundamental difference in the type of magic used by humans and non-humans. The magic used by non-humans is instinctive, rather than a learned skill. This distinction leads to the so-called 'two instincts' rule. Anyone who demonstrates instinctive abilities in at least two magical competencies is subject to Clause Three of the Code, unless they can prove pure-blood wizard heritage."

Harry frowned. "But sir, if they're pure-blood, how could they have those abilities in the first place?"

"Blood gifts are also a type of instinctive ability," Professor Flitwick explained. "Of course, it's extremely unlikely that someone would have more than one blood gift, so it's normally a non-issue."

"Why is there a wand ban, anyway?" Harry muttered. "It's stupid."

Professor Flitwick sighed. "The justification for Clause Three is that instinctive magic reacts unpredictably and uncontrollably when mixed with wand magic. Thus, it's for the public good that non-humans are not allowed wands."

Harry screwed up his face, swallowing back a choice swear. That was the dumbest thing he'd ever heard.

Professor Flitwick flashed him a sympathetic smile. "But we've digressed. You're interested in goblin magic? I may still be of some help."

"Yes, sir," Harry said quickly. "I read that something magical happens with galleons when people spend them, but the book didn't really explain it. Do you know how that works, sir?"

Flitwick's eyes lit up. "Ah, yes, as it happens, I do. Are you aware of the goblin definition of rightful ownership?"

"I think so," said Harry. "The owner is the same as the creator, right? Even if something gets sold, it's just being borrowed, and the buyer has to give it back later."

"Very good," said Professor Flitwick.

Another thought occurred to Harry. "But sir, what if the creator is dead? Then who owns the thing? I remember there's no inheritance."

Professor Flitwick nodded. "Plenty of things are owned by no one. It's only when somebody puts their own magic into improving something that they can call it theirs. Now, who do you imagine owns the galleons in your vault?"

Harry sat up straight in shock. "Goblins make galleons, so they're the owners! But sir, how does that even work? We're still using them as money."

"And the goblins are quite happy for you to do so, as long as they eventually circulate back to Gringotts. The strength of goblin magic grows with the amount of treasure they own and guard. And what makes something treasure?"

Professor Flitwick gave him an expectant look, and Harry realised belatedly that the question was not rhetorical. "It's worth a lot?"

"And why would something be worth a lot?" Professor Flitwick pressed.

"If it's useful," said Harry, but then remembered that gold and jewels weren't necessarily useful in their own right. People wanted them because they were worth a lot—wasn't that circular? Then it hit him. "If people want it. Something's treasure if a lot of people want it?"

"Good, and not only want it, but prove that they want it by giving up something else, by trading. When someone trades something of theirs for a galleon, the galleon grows stronger for the goblin who made it, provided he can get it back one day," Professor Flitwick explained.

Harry frowned. "What if someone steals it? Does that make it worthless?"

Professor Flitwick's eyes stopped smiling with his face. "No, on the contrary. The greater the risk taken by the thief, for example, if the thing was well-guarded or the penalty for being caught very severe, the stronger the treasure."

"So does that mean they want people to steal things?"

"Certainly not," said Professor Flitwick, disapproval creasing his brow. "Once something's stolen, it's difficult to get back. Goblins are very hard on thievery."

Harry nodded quickly. He certainly wasn't planning to rob the bank anytime soon. "Right. Thanks for explaining, sir."

"Of course. You're always welcome to come to me with any questions you have," Professor Flitwick said, jovial again.

A clear solution to Hermione's black market problem began to form in Harry's mind as he left Professor Flitwick's office and headed for dinner. If all that was needed for something to be owned was magic added, then Hermione could take her muggle things, give them some basic enchantments, and render them legal to sell. He would have to tell her the next time he saw her.

He glanced over to the Gryffindor table as he entered the Great Hall, but he didn't see her bushy hair anywhere. She was probably still in the library. He supposed he could find her after Transfiguration next week, if they didn't run into each other over the weekend.

It was always something of a pain to get a hold of his friends in different houses. Harry suddenly remembered Vince's alleged two-way mirror present, still tucked away in his pocket. Something like that would be useful to have for everybody. Then again, it would be inconvenient to have a pile of different mirrors, one for each friend. Could the same mirror be used for multiple people?

Before going to bed, Harry took the opportunity to ask Vince, once he'd ascertained that the magic on the mirror looked the same as on Draco's, and probably wasn't something malicious. Vince answered almost immediately. Harry wondered if he had been waiting for him to call. He felt a little guilty for forgetting about it for so many days.

"I don't think so," said Vince, when Harry asked about multiple mirrors. "They come in pairs. Three would be a mess, 'cause how would you know which side to show? Unless you're using the third one to spy on the other two."

Alarmed, Harry gave his mirror a sidelong glance. "Can you tell if that's happening?"

Vince shrugged.

"Note to self, don't discuss anything important over a mirror," Harry said dryly. "Muggles have got telephones, though. Couldn't it work like that?"

"Like what?" said Vince.

"It's like the tacky-tone from _Martin Miggs._ I'm pretty sure that's actually supposed to be a telephone," Harry muttered.

"Tacky-tones aren't real, though," Vince said, completely missing the point.

"Never mind," said Harry. "You want to hear what Snape had to say about parrying?"

Vince leaned forward eagerly, his face taking up the whole mirror, as Harry related what had happened in duelling club, though he kept the legilimency bit to himself.

"I'm learning to cast without words," said Vince, when Harry mentioned the silencing charm.

Harry gaped. "And it's working?"

Vince nodded. "It's easier than incantations, I think. More natural. Father says I've got to do magic like breathing, instead of like talking."

Harry found this analogy dubious. "But you can't stop breathing, and sometimes you do it accidentally. How's that good?"

Vince shrugged. "It makes sense, though. We're wizards. Why should we ever stop doing magic, and act like we're muggles?"

Reluctantly, Harry closed his mouth as he couldn't think of a good response. What was stopping him from using magic for literally everything? Lack of knowledge and skill. Surely he could not claim that being ignorant and unskilled was better than the converse. If he were capable of such magic, then there would be no reason not to use it.

"I suppose," he mumbled. "Can you show me some nonverbal magic?"

Vince grinned and stood up, backing away from the mirror as he extracted his wand. He brandished it off to the side and a searing bolt of bright blue shot out the end. Harry winced, cracking his watering eyes open suspiciously. He recognised that spell.

"Is that—never mind. That's brilliant," he said. So what if Vince was practising the Enemy's Curse? Harry hardly had room to talk. In fact, he had the strong urge to immediately spring off his bed and try nonverbally casting it too.

"I've been learning a lot," Vince said, approaching his desk again and taking a seat. He looked pleased with himself.

"That's great," Harry said, and meant it. He felt a fleeting stab of envy—if he were at home, Petri could teach him whatever he wanted and he wouldn't have to do pointless busywork—except it was a foolish thought, because Petri could hardly teach him potions, for instance. As uncomfortable as Professor Snape made him now, Harry didn't hate the subject itself.

"Hey," he began, "This is random, but do you know if it's true that Professor Snape used to be a Death Eater?"

Vince peered at him with an awkward expression frozen on his face.

"Never mind," Harry said hastily, choking out a laugh.

"Well, it is true," Vince whispered, leaning close. "It's not really a secret. He was a double agent. Nobody knows whose side he was actually on. He hasn't tried to poison you, has he?"

Harry laughed again, even though he could tell that Vince wasn't joking. "If Snape were interested in poisoning me, I think I'd already be dead. Or worse."

Vince contemplated this assertion gravely, his eyes darkening. "I don't want you to get hurt anymore. You've got to get strong, so people will be too scared to go after you."

Harry thought about getting strong enough to give the Dark Lord pause. He was at least half a century too late for that.

"I wish," he muttered. Then he leaned back and gestured to himself. "It's going to be ages before that happens. Look at me—I'm Harry Potter, second-year at Hogwarts. Fear me."

Vince's lip twitched, but he shook his head. "You _are_ scary, though. I think it's because you don't get scared. That's scary."

"What?" Harry breathed out. "Of course I get scared. I get scared a lot."

Vince shook his head again. "You don't, though. When things are bad for you, horrible, even, you don't run away or cry like a baby, you just keep going, like everything's fine. I—I tried to hurt you, and you didn't hate me forever. You just…" He gestured helplessly between them, eyes wide and earnest.

"It wasn't your fault, though," Harry protested, but even as he said it, he knew that he had skirted the point. For example, every awful thing that Lord Voldemort had ever done had been squarely his fault, and Harry still didn't hate him, not really. Didn't that make him weak? "I don't get it. How does forgiving people make me scary?"

Vince frowned. After a moment, he said, "It's like nothing can touch you. People can hurt you on the outside, but they can't ever get inside to you, so it doesn't matter what they do."

Harry gave him a dubious look. "I dunno, getting hurt on the outside is pretty rubbish. I rather prefer having all my limbs, if it's all the same." He glanced to his silver hand and amended, "Most of my limbs. Whatever."

They both snickered.

Vince yawned. "Sorry, I better go to bed," he said. "Got to get up at six."

Harry made a face. "That early?"

"Yeah. Father's taking me on a trip to visit some… people," said Vince. It was clear he wasn't being completely forthcoming, but Harry figured it was none of his business.

"Oh, sounds exciting. Good night then," he said.

"Good night."

Harry set the mirror and his glasses on his bedside table and drew his hand back through the hangings, slumping into his bed with a muffled thump. Vince somehow thought him unflappable. He tried to square it with his own image of himself. Had he always been like this?

No, he knew with sudden surety. He used to get angry and hold on to that hot anger until it formed a molten core, and he would press and press until it erupted in an uncontrollable burst to rain on anybody nearby. How many hundreds of times had Uncle Vernon shoved him into his cupboard for mouthing off, even though he had known better? He knew anger, heady and searing.

Harry tried to imagine Uncle Vernon's purple face, Dudley sniggering in the background. It was hard, like reaching for the fragments of a dream that he had retold in the waking world, so that he couldn't know what was his imagination from before and what was his imagination here and now. Giving up, he pictured Lord Voldemort instead, monstrously pale and tall, an embodied spectre of death.

' _When the time comes that you tire of this life…'_

A high, cold laugh. A screaming woman.

' _Please—not Harry!'_

' _Avada Kedavra!'_ Sickly green light, the rushing of air through a deep tunnel.

Harry shut his eyes tight, holding his breath in a bid to summon rage and compact it into hatred. A rippling chord of tension rang through his whole body. He choked suddenly, finding himself gasping for air, brow damp with condensation. Shaking, he curled up on his side. He only felt cold.


End file.
